Spells in Silence
by Silently Watches
Summary: Hazel Potter has always been strange. People say she knows too much and says too little. When Aunt Petunia utters that forbidden word, 'magic', it sends Hazel on a hunt for the truth. If only the Wizarding World could have guided the direction of her search… femHarry with a focus on witchcraft
1. Silent Tears

**This work brings together a number of related ideas that have been dispersed across several of my stories, some published and others not. I have no clue where it is going. Will it be a tale of the Dark victorious like the Black Queen series? Will it have a happy ending like ****What Happens in Vegas****? Will it descend into bleak depression like ****Deal with a Devil****? I hope not the third one, but there is no way to predict anything right now.**

**It is in some ways yet another reaction to what is probably my biggest beef with the Harry Potter franchise: how in a world where every main character is a wizard, there is no mysticism or real magic in what they do. It's all point a stick, say a few rote words, and move on to the next task. There is no effort, no creativity, no individuality.**

**Let's fix that.**

* * *

**Chapter 1  
****Silent Tears**

"Where'd she go?! She was right here!"

A too-thin girl slowly leaned over the edge of the rooftop and glanced down at the six boys milling around aimlessly in the narrow dead-end between two school buildings. All of them were practically vibrating with confusion, their thoughts bouncing around as they tried to figure out where the target of their 'fun' could have gone, but the biggest and meanest of them had a thread of fear running through him. Thoughts like _"People don't disappear"_ and _"She has to be here"_ warred with _"How'd she do that?"_ and _"Freaky..."_ in his head. The blond boy lifted his head higher, as though thinking she might have climbed up the walls, and she pulled back so he would not get a glimpse of her shaggy black hair or her green eyes.

"She must have jumped over the fence."

"We were right behind her, Dudley! She's not that fast!"

"You got a better idea?!" Dudley demanded. No one answered him, and even from on top of the building and out of sight she could still feel the satisfaction that flooded through him at their acceptance. Three years he had spent putting his little gang together, she knew, and even now he still feared that one of them would challenge his authority and knock him from the top. He had reason to fear this, too; Marcus had considered it several times over the last year, and the only thing that was stopping him was that he in turn was afraid that none of the other boys would back him up and instead would hold him down where Dudley could beat on him. "Let's go. We'll get back at her tomorrow."

The 'her' in question flopped onto her back with a quiet huff. She rarely expected tomorrow to be any better than today, and after hearing that she felt her doubts were once again going to be well founded. Boys were not supposed to hit girls, that was something the teachers constantly told everyone at Little Whinging Primary School, but none of those same teachers would lift a finger to defend _her_.

Everyone from the other children to the teachers to the principal all thought the same thing. Hazel Potter was weird, a freak, and she deserved whatever happened to her.

Hazel pushed herself upright and glared at the pockets of snow still lingering on the tiles. It was not as if it was her fault that strange things always seemed to happen to her! Like the time her Aunt Petunia told her she had to wear a black and white dress that looked like it was from the 1930s, a dress she knew her aunt had picked up for less than a pound at a charity shop. Her aunt had been so pleased with herself about that, about how ugly she knew the dress was and how Hazel did not deserve to have 'normal people money' spent on her. The next morning, Hazel had woken to find the dress had shrunk overnight so small that it would not fit even a doll, let alone her. She had spent a week locked in the cupboard under the stairs after that, even though no one ever tried to explain how she was supposed to be responsible for that.

Or the time when one of the girls in her class had been making fun of how quiet she was only to start braying like a horse. Marissa was unable to talk normally for the rest of the day and had to be taken home early by her mother. Because Hazel had been the victim, the school had called Aunt Petunia to tell her about it. Hazel's shoulder twinged at the memory of Uncle Vernon's punishment for being 'freakish' in public like that.

Even her appearance was considered 'abnormal'. Not necessarily the faded skirt or the overlarge shirt that had once been Dudley's, nor the wild black hair that Aunt Petunia insisted on cutting as short as a boy's, nor the grass-green eyes that stared out from behind ugly plastic glasses. No, it was instead the aftermath of the incident that had killed her parents. Her fingers reached up to trace the pale, puckered line crossing her throat, sloping upwards slightly as it ran from the left to the right. Whatever happened had not just stolen her parents; it also left her without a voice to call her own.

Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon said her parents died in a car crash while driving drunk, but that was a lie.

Her silence was in all honesty only the second oddest thing about Hazel Potter, but it was the first thing on people's minds when they saw her, and in many ways it was the most debilitating. She could not talk with other children in her class, and until she had learned her letters and how to read and write when she first started school, she was left with no way to communicate even if she had anyone at home willing to listen. Stuck playing charades or writing out anything she wanted other people to know, she was intimately familiar with the feeling of being ignored because it was so much easier for teachers to ignore her than they could other kids who yelled out whatever they wanted to say.

"Miss Potter! Where are you?!"

Hazel winced at the shrill sound of Mrs. Nicholson's voice and climbed to her feet. Break must be over. Stepping to the edge, she waved her hand until the teacher glanced up. The oldest teacher still working at the school stared at her for a long moment. _"The bloody hell is she doing there?"_ the woman asked, using language Hazel had seen her smack people's hands for using in front of her. Finally she voiced the obvious question. "How did you even get up there?"

Her shoulders slumped at the stupidity of anyone asking her a question like that.

"Right, never mind. Just get down here, _you creepy little shit._" Hazel ignored the insult with the ease of long practice and started looking for a ladder, but she froze in place when she heard Mrs. Nicholson's next words.

"When you come down, go to the principal's office and wait for your aunt."

* * *

The car ride back to Number 4 Privet Drive was anything but quiet, even if nobody spoke. In the back seat next to Hazel, Dudley sat with a big fat grin, his piggy little eyes watching her in anticipation of the punishment she was sure to receive. Ugly laughter echoed in his head, and his thoughts turned towards what his daddy would do to the dumb freak. In the driver's seat, Aunt Petunia was distracted by having to keep her eyes and attention on the road, but whenever she looked in the rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of Hazel, a terrible anger would overtake her and she would have to look forwards again. _"She's not just a freak. She's an abomination. Why were we the ones who had to take her in? Should have taken her to an orphanage as soon as we found her on the front step."_

Hazel had been six years old when she realized hearing other people's thoughts was not something Normal People did. It was certainly not something anyone else on Privet Drive and the nearby streets could do, otherwise the ladies in Aunt Petunia's tea group would realize they all hated one another and quit wasting their time trying to impress everyone else. She only knew for sure that it was something abnormal – something _special_ and unique to her – when she had asked her year 1 teacher why she thought Hazel was so disturbing. The teacher gave her a nonsense answer about how all children were special and precious even as fear and the question of how she could be so easily seen through danced around her mind.

Over the next few years, Hazel had learned a number of lessons that made her ever more eager for the chance to leave Little Whinging when it came time for secondary school or, barring that, when she turned eighteen. First, the people in this town were all awful. The children thought she was weird and creepy and were happy to remind her of that if she came too close to them. The adults, the same ones who smiled and said everyone should be treated equally and everyone should be nice to each other, were more than willing to turn a blind eye whenever anything happened to the mute girl who always saw too much, always knew too much, for they had the same opinions as their children.

Second, and related to the first, people were liars. Rarely did their words match their thoughts, and many of them were quick to punish people for the same things they did. Mrs. Nicholson was a prime example of this.

And third, the Dursleys were not her family. Not really. Families were supposed to love and care for each other; they were supposed to be the one group of people she could count on no matter what. That was what all the books she had read in school told her. The Dursleys did not care for her. They hated her, Aunt Petunia even more than Uncle Vernon and Dudley, and wanted nothing to do with her. Every time they locked her in the cupboard that served as her bedroom, they wished they did not have to have her in the house at all.

The only reason they had not thrown her out already was an image of a dark figure that sometimes crossed their minds when they let her out of her cupboard or after Uncle Vernon smacked her. She did not know who this figure was, but she knew they feared him more than they hated her, if only by a little.

She did not know when or if their opinions would tilt the other way, but it seemed like as she got older, their hatred and more recently their fear of her were growing stronger and faster.

They pulled up into the driveway in front of Number 4, and Hazel barely had time to grab her backpack before Aunt Petunia opened the door and twisted her ear. "Get inside, _freak, before anyone sees_. In your cupboard. Now. _Should lock you inside and let you starve. We'd be rid of you then._ What have I told you about being… _abnormal_ in public?!"

Hazel reached for her bag to grab her pen and pad of paper, but Aunt Petunia yanked harder on her ear. It was not as if she did whatever she did on purpose! Aunt Petunia did not really care about that, though. Intentions or accidents meant nothing when it came to her.

"_She's getting worse. She'll be just like Lily at her age soon."_

Like Lily? Hazel twisted in her aunt's grasp to stare up at the blonde woman. Aunt Petunia rarely thought of Hazel's mother, in fact did her best not to think of her at all, and this was the first time Hazel had heard anything about her mother being like her. The confusion and curiosity in her eyes startled Aunt Petunia, and the woman opened the cupboard door and threw Hazel and then her backpack inside. "You'll stay in there for a week. If you do anything freakish, _any magic_, it'll be longer!"

That word swirled around in Hazel's mind as she sat for hours in the dark and spawned countless questions to which she had no answers. Magic? What she could do, that was magic? Her _mother_ could do magic? What else could she do, could they do? Were there other people like her out in the world?

She knew exactly when Aunt Petunia told Uncle Vernon what happened earlier that day because the wave of utter rage and terror hit her almost like a physical thing. He stomped up to the door of her cupboard. For a long moment she worried he would decide to reach inside, but in the end he decided to stay on the opposite side of the door _"Maybe we should have listened to Marge. Drowned the girl when she was a baby._ You are staying in this cupboard until you've learned your lesson! Do you hear me, girl? It's long past time you start acting like a regular, normal person! _But she won't. She was never normal, and she'll never be normal. I won't have that in my home!"_

The thoughts in Uncle Vernon's head sent shivers down Hazel's spine. She barely breathed until he finally walked away towards his and Aunt Petunia's bedroom. This was not the first time a Dursley had wanted her to die, but before it had only been Aunt Marge, Uncle Vernon's sister, who thought that. Until tonight, that was, and the very fact that he was seriously considering following her advice terrified Hazel.

Whoever that dark figure in the Dursleys' memories was, he was no longer the person they feared most. But unlike him, _her_ they could do something about.

She had to escape this cupboard. This house. These people. Or else they might very well kill her this time.

* * *

Whenever the Dursleys locked her in her cupboard for days and days like this, they did not leave her entirely alone. She was let out to use the loo and drink a glass of water exactly twice a day. Two glasses of water a day was not enough; they knew that, and therefore Hazel did too. As the days went on, she would feel more and more sick until most days she wanted nothing more than to go back into the cupboard and sleep.

Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon both thought this was the best way to 'fix' her.

Hazel looked up at the bottom of the stairs that made up the top of her cupboard and waited for silence to fill the house. Six days she had spent locked in her cupboard so far. The fear and anger the Dursleys had not decreased, though unlike that first night they were no longer considering starving or drowning her. Their minds instead had focused on all the chores they could give her to keep her too busy to cause trouble. They thought if they physically wore her out, strange things would cease to happen around her. She doubted it would work, but as the days went by and the sense of danger shrank, she was tempted to keep her head down and not rock the boat.

The downside to that idea was that she would have to let go of the questions Aunt Petunia's accidental thought had uncovered.

The house creaked, and Hazel closed her eyes and tried to focus. That was fear of the unknown talking. What she should be afraid of was what would happen in the future. The odd events – the magical events – around her were becoming stronger and stranger, and her aunt and uncle's punishments for them were getting worse in response. They had decided not to kill her this week, but would that continue to be the case in a year, or two, or five? In the worst case, was it possible for their patience to last another nine years until she turned eighteen and finally left Privet Drive behind forever?

She did not like those odds. The sooner she escaped this place, the safer she would be.

Her punishment gave her the perfect opportunity to work through what had happened at school. One moment, she was being chased by Dudley's gang, and the next moment she was on top of the building. Other than a strange squeezing sensation, almost as if she were toothpaste being forced out a tube, it had been instant. Teleportation was yet another thing the Dursleys said was impossible, but so was everything she had ever done. What she really wanted to know was whether she could do it again. Every night when the Dursleys went to sleep, she attempted to repeat the experience.

The results so far were… less than encouraging.

Once again, Hazel imagined that squeezing sensation and pictured the kitchen of Number 4. Once again, that sensation failed to come, and she opened her eyes to find herself still in her cupboard. _What am I doing wrong?_, she wondered, scrubbing her eyes to wipe away the sleep dust that was trying to form. Practicing all night and trying to sleep through Aunt Petunia moving around in the house watching the telly during the day did not lend itself to much in the way of rest, and that was not helping either, she was sure. Still, she had limited time in which to figure out what she was doing. Now was no time to relax.

_When I did it Friday, I was running from Dudley. Can't exactly run around in here_, she thought with a look around the cramped interior of the cupboard that was not large enough for her even to stand, _and I wouldn't ask Dudley to chase me even if I could. I wanted to be somewhere else, but I'm imagining where I want to go and not getting there. I know I don't want to be _here_, but that doesn't work either. Nor does imagining the kitchen _and_ wanting not to be here. What else is there?!_

After so many nights without making any headway, Hazel was losing her patience. How could it be so difficult to do intentionally what she did on accident without even knowing she could do it? She swept her hand out and yanked it back when it banged painfully into the wall. She was not asking for much, was she?! All she wanted was to be. In. The. Kitchen—!

The cupboard collapsed around her and squeezed all the air out of her chest. For a long second she was afraid she would suffocate, but then with a 'crack' she fell forwards onto a linoleum floor. She recognized these tiles.

Hazel would have whooped with joy if she could make such a sound. Instead she climbed to her feet and ran to the cupboard. Unlocking it was easy now that she was on this side of the door, and she pulled out the few clothes she had and stuffed them into her backpack. Her school books and notebooks she left on the cot in the cupboard with the exception of one blank pad of paper and the collection of colored pens she had collected over the years whenever she found one abandoned on the floor. These she would need if she wanted to talk to anyone she met.

She had plenty of space left in her bag, and she ran down the mental checklist she had made the first night locked in the cupboard when she had decided she could not wait until she got into secondary school or became an adult. She was leaving Privet Drive for good. Tonight.

Just because she was young did not mean she was a fool. She knew she could not run away and stay away with nothing but a few changes of clothes in a backpack. She needed something to live off of. Her next stop was therefore back in the kitchen. Cans of vegetables and meat, a jar of peanut butter, and a loaf of bread filled that extra space easily. It weighed her down, of course, but it would give her something to eat while she was planning her next move.

Her eyes fell on Aunt Petunia's purse, and she nibbled on her bottom lip. Taking food from the cabinets was one thing. Stealing money was another altogether. Stealing was something no one was supposed to do. _But neither is treating 'family' like Aunt Petunia does me,_ she thought. Opening the purse before she lost her nerve, she pulled out a sheaf of bills and shoved them in her pocket.

There. She had clothes, food, and money. She had everything she wanted to take with her from Privet Drive.

She stopped and looked down the hall in the direction of Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon's bedroom. Nearly everything, that was. She set her backpack down in the front hall and padded her way through the house in her socks, slowly opening a door to reveal her aunt and uncle lying in bed sound asleep. There was one thing Aunt Petunia still had that Hazel wanted, _needed_, more desperately than she has ever needed anything else before.

Aunt Petunia's thoughts were proof that Hazel's mother had abilities similar to her own. What exactly was their magic capable of? How much did Aunt Petunia know about the hows and whys? Hazel did not expect her to be a walking encyclopedia of all things magic – the idea that her aunt would go out of her way to learn about something she so clearly hated was laughable – but whatever she knew was more than Hazel did. Even a single hint would give her a direction to start looking.

If the number of odd things that had already happened around Hazel were any hint, she could probably spend her whole life digging into its mysteries. She could not say for sure that she would want to do that forever, but it was far and away the most interesting thing she had come across in her life so far. It was better than learning her multiplication tables and how to use semicolons, that was for sure.

Hazel leaned over her sleeping aunt. She had only done something like this once, when she was trying to figure out why Melissa Grant hated her so much back in year 3. By 'pushing' herself into Melissa's eyes instead of just listening, she had gotten a flurry of sounds and images and a splitting headache and given Melissa another reason to hate her. The entire thing had caught her off-balance, but with Aunt Petunia asleep and plenty of time on her side, she should be able to get a better picture of what was going on.

Peeling one of her aunt's eyes open, she let herself fall into the mind behind it. _Tell me about my mum. Tell me about our magic._

Images flew past her, bits and pieces of memory trying to drown her in the past.

…"_I don't want you or your freak boyfriend here!" Petunia, dressed up in a fancy white gown, screaming at a woman with long red hair and Hazel's eyes…_

…_That same woman, now a girl not much older than Hazel herself, leaping off a swing and drifting to the ground…_

…_A letter with old-fashioned writing on it, addressed to Petunia Evans…_

…"_Lily, stop it!" Petunia shouted as cups and dishes whirled around a crying teenaged girl…_

…_A flower in a little girl's hand, opening and closing while she giggled…_

…_Hazel staring up at her, eyes cold and distrustful…_

…_Opening the door to get the milk only to find a basket with a black-haired girl inside…_

…"_Muggles are not allowed"…_

…_Lily holding a teacup in her hand as it shifted smoothly into a white mouse…_

…"_It's good you're being separated from normal people"…_

…"_Your sister and her husband have passed away"…_

…_Teenaged Petunia shoving Lily away, causing the younger girl to burst into tears…_

A loud snort distracted Hazel from the onslaught of memories, and Uncle Vernon rolled onto his side and sat up. He pushed himself out of the bed before taking a couple of steps towards the loo. Hazel held her breath, hoping against hope that he would keep walking and close the door. If he did that, she could slip away and make her escape with him being none the wiser.

He scratched his belly and turned to the side, his sleepy mind filled with thoughts of finding his slippers. Seeing something out of the corner of his eye, he looked over and stared straight at Hazel. All thoughts of sleep or slippers vanished and were replaced by fear that burned into anger.

"Girl!"

Hazel was already moving, her sock-clad feet slapping against the wooden floor. She had to run! Now! She slid through the living room and bounced off the wall, her backpack and the front door only a short distance in front of her and taunting her.

Uncle Vernon ran out of the bedroom, a cricket bat held tight in his hands.

There was no time to stop for her shoes or her coat. She ran down the hall, her backpack jumping into her hand without her having to bend down and pick it up. The front door opened outwards rather than in, a small mercy now, and a moment later she was sprinting down the snowy sidewalk towards Magnolia Crescent.

"You better run, girl! _I'm going to bash your head in!"_ Uncle Vernon had not stopped at the doorstep. He was still after her, and while he was even less of a runner than Dudley, he was taller than her and had longer legs. She dared not look behind her to see whether he was gaining on her or falling behind. She did not have the time to spare. She needed to be away from him, away from _here_. Somewhere, anywhere, she did not care. As long as it was somewhere safe!

Her entire body was squeezed through a tube, and Hazel Potter vanished from Privet Drive.

* * *

**I did some research into runaway youth before writing this story. The statistics are downright depressing. For example, did you know Hazel would be just one of the more than 100,000 kids who run away from home in the UK every single year? I won't include many of the major risks runaways face in this story (especially drug use and needing to trade sex for food or shelter), but some of the other things Hazel will experience are similar to those faced by real-world runaways, just with a fantasy bent.**

**As you can see, Hazel is very, **_**very**_** different from canon Harry. Most of that is because unlike canon, Hazel had it thrust in her face on a daily basis that the Dursleys did not and never would love her. That is going to do a number on anyone's psyche.**

**Silently Watches out.**


	2. Freedom

**Catsieee:** Hazel is a full-on Legilimens. I wasn't a huge fan of the Fantastic Beasts movies (in fact, I never finished the second one), but Queenie's ability was… interesting, even if it does contradict what Snape said about Legilimency not being the same as "reading minds". Or maybe he doesn't know as much about it as he thinks he does. Regardless, I'm trying to strike a balance between the two, so surface thoughts are there for the taking but memories are harder to parse out and interpret.

**Chicwowwow:** Oh, Hazel will have friends. Just not the kind you expect. ;-)

**"Hazel's mute? That's different":** It is, though the novelty is only one of the three reasons I went with it and honestly the least important. The second reason is because I don't want to imagine how short her lifespan would have been had she been able to tell the Dursleys that she could hear their every thought. If she had to wait until she could read and write, it makes her safer because she would know by that point that any hint of freakishness would be severely punished. The third reason… You'll just have to wait and see.

* * *

**Chapter 2  
****Freedom**

The poorly lit sidewalks of Privet Drive vanished into darkness, and something came out of nowhere to crash into Hazel's chest and drive her to the ground.

It was only as she lay on a surprisingly carpeted floor trying to catch the breath that had been knocked out of her that her eyes adjusted to the lack of light that she realized where her terrified teleportation had taken her. She was back at school, more specifically in the library. That thing that hit her? A table she had run into all on her own.

Why in the world had she come here of all places?

She pushed herself up on her hands and looked around at the bookcases that surrounded her. Maybe it did make a little bit of sense, she decided as she thought over it some more. This was not like the little skip and hop she took to get from her cupboard to the kitchen; it was closer to what happened when she was running away from Dudley and his gang. Once again, she was running away from an angry Dursley, and one again this freakish—

No, she decided as she realized what she was thinking. She was still believing the lies of her aunt and uncle. She was _not_ a freak. She was _special_. She was a witch, a sorceress, a magician.

Who else could have done something like this?! She had just teleported! It was like having superpowers off the telly.

Hazel climbed to her feet and nodded. She had magic powers, and Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon were scared of her and what she could do. Which was really, really stupid of them. She held no illusions about what they wanted out of life. They wanted to be praised and talked about and envied. If Aunt Petunia had taught Hazel what little she knew about her mother and their shared powers, she could have done all sorts of things for their benefit.

It would serve them right if she came back once she had learned what she was doing and taught them a lesson.

Thinking about that confrontation brought back the recent memory of her uncle chasing her down the street with a cricket bat, and she shuddered. Maybe getting even with the Dursleys was something to put a little farther down on her to-do list.

Anyway, the library. She knew why she showed up here when she was trying to go anywhere to get away from Uncle Vernon. The library had been her safe place more often than not whenever Dudley was after her. The librarian did not approve of ruckus or horseplay, and as long as Hazel was quiet – obviously an uphill battle – when Dudley wanted to start something, it was the boys who would get thrown out and she could be left alone.

Miss Brandine was probably her favorite out of all the staff at school, if only because she was the only one who appreciated Hazel's inability to speak.

She rubbed the lingering ache in her chest and carefully wandered over to where she thought the light switch was. A minute or two of searching finally found it, and she smiled when the library was lit up so she could actually see. That smile faded a moment later.

Yes, she was away from Privet Drive. That just meant she had no clue what to do from here. It was not as if she could stay here at school even if she wanted to. Everyone here ignored her at best, and it was not as if there were any classes here about what to do if someone suddenly learned they had inherited magic powers from the mother their aunt never talked about.

…At least, she did not think there were. Hazel took a moment to imagine that but quickly shook her head. That was silly. The people of this town were too plain, too boring, to be training a coven of witches in secret.

Knowing that she could not stay here did nothing to help her figure out where she did want to go. A yawn caught her by surprise and reinforced the importance of deciding on her next step. She had spent the last week pushing herself every night just to get the one thing she could do working. She needed rest.

She would get neither here, not sleep nor information—

Some place in the back of her mind snapped the pieces together, and her eyes opened wide. Perhaps she _should_ look for both in the same place. She would not find any useful information in the school library, but she might in a real library. Little Whinging did not have a public library, but Greater Whinging _did_. She had seen in, too, albeit from a distance during a school trip when Aunt Petunia could not come up with a reasonable excuse for why Dudley could go but Hazel could not. Her mother must have learned how to control her magic to be able to do all the things Hazel saw in Aunt Petunia's memories, which meant a book or a teacher existed somewhere. She just had to find it.

Why did Uncle Vernon have to wake up before she could learn anything useful?!

Greater Whinging had another advantage, now that she thought about it. No one would recognize her. Being unknown meant no one would call the Dursleys and tip them off about where she was hiding. Somehow, she did not think they would welcome her back with open arms after this. Uncle Vernon would be more likely to try finishing what he started.

Now that she had a plan, Hazel wracked her brain trying to remember what the library looked like. Teleportation seemed to work better if she knew where she was going. That she appeared in the library when she reached out for somewhere safe was proof enough of that. Try as she might, she could not remember what it looked like, but she thought she remembered where she had been when she saw it on the trip. They had lunch at a small sandwich shop, though it did not serve normal sandwiches. It was something foreign. Cuban, that was right; Uncle Vernon had thrown a fit that the school fed his precious Dudders 'dirty Commie food'.

That place she remembered.

She hitched her backpack higher on her shoulders. Step one, get to the sandwich shop. Step two, find the library. Step three… she would figure out when she finished the other steps. Picturing the restaurant as best she could, she closed her eyes and willed herself to be there.

One eye cracked open to find her still in the school library.

Perhaps it was a good thing she could not speak because the words running through her head right now would have even loving relatives washing her mouth out with soap. This worked three times already! Twice on accident, and again on purpose! Why was it not working now?!

_Alright Hazel_, she asked herself, pushing her frustration away just as she always had to do back home, _what's different this time?_ There had to be an explanation. It obviously was possible since she had done it. It could be done intentionally, too. She had to be missing something, something fundamental.

The first time, she was trying to escape Dudley.

The second time, she was trying to escape the cupboard.

The third time, she was trying to escape Uncle Vernon.

Hazel blinked. Was that the secret after all? Was what she was doing only for getting away? That seemed astonishingly limited for magic of all things, but she only learned about magic a week ago in the first place. There were bound to be rules she knew nothing about. _I'm not going to the restaurant. I'm just trying to get away from this place, and the restaurant is the most convenient place to go_.

Still nothing.

She gave a nearby chair an angry kick and hopped on her other foot when the chair hit back. No shoes, right. She fell into a different chair, one that thankfully did not attack her, and rubbed her stubbed toes. If escaping was not the trick, what was?

The message of her aching toes slowed to a stop. This was not the first time she got angry tonight. She had been angry at her lack of success, and that was when she actually succeeded. When she was running away, she was scared, terrified in the case of Uncle Vernon. And now that her thoughts were running in this direction, she looked back at all the other times she had used her magic, even if only by accident. Every single time, she was angry or scared. Not when she was happy, the few times she had truly been happy. Not when she sat in her cupboard crying.

Anger. Fear. Those were the only common factors. Was that the fuel her magic needed?

It was not difficult to feel angry, nor after everything that happened this night. Being lied to. Being chased down. Being stuck in her school because her magic _would not cooperate_. She had every right to be angry! All she want was to go to a stupid sandwich shop! Was that really so hard?!

She jumped up in the air—

—and her feet landed in snow.

Her breath blew out in a thick cloud while she looked down an unfamiliar street, and she turned her head to the right to find the front of a little eatery squeezed between two bigger stores. She jumped again, but this time in joy. She had done it! She was one step closer to mastery over teleportation and her magic in general.

Hazel hoped as she got more experience, she would be able to do stuff like this without needing to be mad. She only imagine what kind of person she would become if she had to be angry all the time. If Aunt Petunia's memories were any indication, though, her mother appeared to be able to control her own powers without it, so more likely it was just a matter of practice.

An ice-cold wind swept through the street and drove knives into her skin. Dudley's castoffs and the few cheap skirts Aunt Petunia had reluctantly purchased for her were too old and worn thin to provide effective protection against the winter's chill. It would be pitiful for her to escape her relatives' wrath only to freeze to death on the way to safety. Instead she wrapped her arms tight around her thin body to try to hold in what warmth she could and started trekking through the snowy sidewalks. She thought the library was this way, but with all the snow in the air that had been kicked up by the wind, she could not say for sure. She would have to hope she got lucky.

Her own thought startled a scoff out of her. Luck. Right. Because she was just the epitome of a lucky girl.

The wind pushed her off the sidewalk more than once as she stumbled her way down the street on feet that had long ago gone numb, but eventually a white building came into view through the storm of white that was nearly blinding her. Several steps later, the words _Greater Whinging Public Library_ could be seen carved into the wall above the pillars. And beyond those pillars lay doors that would be her salvation.

Hazel slipped as she walked up the steps and scrambled the rest of the way on all fours. Inside of the library lay only darkness, but she would take it so long as it was warm. Her hand wrapped clumsily around the handle, but no matter how hard she tugged, the door refused to budge. It was locked tight.

Tears of frustration gathered in her eyes. This wasn't fair! Not when she had come this far. Was it too much to ask for to be allowed to live after running away from the only home she knew? Could she not get even that little bit of mercy?

It was only because she was pressing her head against the door that she heard the soft click. Trying the handle again, the door moved easily.

She squeezed through the door and closed it quickly behind her, breathing out a sigh of relief. _Oh warmth, how I love you_. Looking up from the ground, she smiled when she saw the stacks stuffed with books of all sorts. This place was so much bigger than she had imagined. It was surely far from the largest library in the country, of that she had no doubt, but it was large enough for her to start her search. Exactly what she would look for was a decision for after sleeping.

Climbing the stairs to the top floor, she found a room with several desks pushed against the walls. One lesson she had learned at Privet Drive would likely remain useful for a long time to come: as long as she stayed out of the way, people would be less likely to actively search for her. She pushed her backpack into a corner under one of the desks and climbed in after it.

Sleep claimed her almost before she closed her eyes.

* * *

Opening her eyes was nearly painful, but slowly Hazel managed it and looked around herself. The room she had chosen as her temporary resting place was all but empty, and the one man who was in the room had headphones covering his ears as he stared into a machine sitting on the desk that she had not noticed during her wandering. With sight and hearing both occupied, it was no challenge to leave him to his research into… fashion trends of the 1930s?

Hazel stared at him for a long time before shaking her head. Grown-ups were weird.

This time she really did leave him alone, moving on for her actual goal. The question still lingering in her mind was where she would find any information about magic. It was clearly something rare, otherwise she would have heard of it before now. Any stories that talked about it were make-believe if her teachers were to be trusted. So where would she find hints about how to control her powers and use them at will?

A sliver of worry wormed itself into her heart. Maybe the reason it was considered nothing but a flight of fancy was because it was so rare that there were no books or lessons to be found. Maybe her mother had nothing but her own guesses to guide her, and now what lessons she had learned were lost forever.

She shook her head. This was not the time for despair and doubt. There was something, somewhere, to help her. She was sure of that much.

Outside the room where she had slept, the main room of the library was open in the middle from the ground floor all the way to the third, giving the building a bright and open feeling. Coming off the circular walkways on the higher floors like the one where she stood now were a number of rooms full of more books. It was certainly a better place to start looking for magic lessons than anywhere in Little Whinging. She just hoped it would be enough.

Unfortunately she had no clue where in this building she needed to start looking, but another look downwards gave her a guide. Specifically, the card catalog was in the middle of the circular ground floor. Surely there would be a listing for magic in there. Right?

It was only when she started down the stairs that she realized there might be a small problem.

_"Why isn't she wearing any shoes?"_

_"Look at her clothes. Did she dig them out of a skip or something?"_

_"Who let someone like __**that**__ in here? I didn't give them a donation so they could let her kind in here."_

She shot the man who made that last thought an ugly look. What did he mean, 'her kind'? Was he talking about her clothing? It was not her fault this was all she had from the Dursleys. She would wear better clothes if she had them!

Forcing his nastiness out her her own head, she meandered over to the card catalog and pulled open the drawer labeled 'M'. It was time to find some answers.

"What are you doing here? _Probably plans to pick people's pockets or something_." Hazel looked up to find a librarian staring down at her, her eyes holding none of the faint warmth that Miss Brandine's had. They instead flickered to each article of her clothing in an increasing wordless disgust. Then those judging eyes reached her feet and lit up with satisfaction. "_There's a reason I can get rid of her._ You can't be in here without shoes, girl. Get out."

She looked around quickly, searching for a piece of paper or anything else she could write on. She did not know what kind of lie she would tell, especially not when this woman was already set on kicking her out, but anything would be better than silence.

"I said out!" The librarian grabbed a long ruler, and knowing from the direction of the woman's thoughts that her choices were to leave without being hit or to be driven out after getting hit, Hazel took the less bad option and started walking backwards towards the door. That walk became a run when the angry librarian chased after her. The door slammed shut behind her, and she looked back to find the woman shaking the ruler at her. "_And she better stay out. Tramps like her can find somewhere else to stay warm. Libraries are for decent folk._"

Decent folk, ha! Hazel glared at her through the glass door before shivering. 'Decent' people did not throw other people out of buildings to stand around in nothing but socks in the snow. Again. Not that the librarian cared, if the warning look she gave Hazel before returning to the front desk was any indication.

Another shiver swept through her body. Of course, any extra clothes she could put on to stay warm were all safe and sound in her backpack inside the library, as was her food and what little money she had. Even if she did not still need to look for books about magic, she would need to sneak back inside for all her stuff.

It looked like she would have to stay on a schedule where she lived by the moon rather than the sun.

The cold was still a problem, and Hazel hopped from one foot to another before striking off down the little alleyway between the library and whatever building was next to it. She needed to find somewhere to keep from freezing while she was waiting for night to fall and the library to close to everyone except her. Somewhere that was warm, close to the building, and would not throw her out for wearing her Dursley clothes. Somehow, she had a feeling the last would be the sticking point.

A glance upwards at the fire escape on the side of the other building caused her to see a puff of white smoke wafting through the sky. It looked like it was coming from the library, but there was no reason it should be smoking like that. She hoped it was not on fire, but nobody was running out the front doors, so that was not it—

She slapped her hand over her face in exasperation with herself. That was not smoke. It was steam! The library was a big building, so like her school it probably had a boiler room or something to heat it. And steam was nice and hot. The roof was not the best place to wait out the day, but it was better than freezing to death here on the street. She just needed to get up there. Fortunately, she had exactly the skill needed to do that.

It took little effort to get mad at the librarian again. She was mad, and she wanted to be up there. Hazel jumped up, but a moment later she hit the damp ground again, no higher than she had been before.

This was certainly not helping her temper, but this time it was directed as much at herself as it was anything else. The inconsistency in all this was really getting on her nerves.

She leaned against the brick wall and tried to walk through what had gone wrong _this_ time. She had it working just fine last night, when she got angry at being in the library. She was clearly still missing something.

_Anger, check. Knowing where I want to go, check. Or check-ish?_ She looked up at the roof again. Maybe it was because she did not know where it looked like? That had not interfered with her teleporting when running away from Dudley, but it seemed to apply the other times. So it could just be a limitation in that she had to know where she was going.

The other possibility was that maybe the anger had to be more directed, and that one struck her as more true. She could not explain why, even to herself, but it just felt right. Her emotions had been aligned the previous times with moving from one place to another, not just anger at anything at all.

_I'm not just angry at her for kicking me out. I'm angry because not only did she kick me out, she did it where I'm going to have to cuddle up to a steam vent just to stay warm. Where I'm going to have to wait until night falls just so I can get back to my stuff. _Focusing on this directed anger and the desire to be up there instead of where she was, she hopped once and felt the world try to crush her in response. When it failed to do that, she opened her eyes to find that she had appeared on the top level of the fire escape just where she was aiming. That had been almost easy.

Could she do it again? Twice in a row?

Focusing on the rooftop and all the metal ductwork she could see, including the short pipe where the steam was pouring out, she ignored the fact that she was thirty or so feet above the ground and all it would take was one bad hop for her to tumble over the rail and crack her head open like an egg on the tarmac. All she cared about was the rooftop. She fed more anger at her situation into her magic, then she jumped again.

A blast of steam nearly burned her face off, and she staggered backwards to get away from too much heat before she jumped into the air and threw both her hands over her head. She did it! She was starting to get the hang of this whole magic thing!

Even better, at least for her immediate needs, the roof was relatively dry, and there was a section of air vents that was lifted up to provide a small crawlspace. An adult would not be able to fit in it, but for a girl as short and thin as she was, it was actually rather comfortable. Steam coming out from several feet away wafted around her, reaching a nice comfortable middle ground rather than freezing or boiling. It was pleasant enough that she found her eyes drifting closed even with three cars backfiring in quick succession nearby.

She _had_ intended to be up at night and sleep during the day. Might as well start now.

* * *

A chill dragged Hazel back from the land of dreams, and she poked her head out from under the ductwork to find that the last rays of the sun were vanishing below the horizon and the street lights were already lit. She wiggled out from under the ducts and stretched with a wide-mouthed yawn. She must have been a lot more tired that she had thought if she was able to sleep the entire day away on a roof.

That was then, though. Now she was awake, and it looked like all the people previously in the library were leaving for their own homes. _Probably they have a nice warm dinner waiting for them_, she added when her stomach chimed in with how much it would like a big dinner right about now. She gave it a pat. It would be fed soon enough, just as soon as nobody else was in the building and she could let herself inside. There was a peanut butter sandwich and a tin of Spam calling her name.

A glance around reminded her of the major issue with her current situation. Namely that she had to get back to the ground. She tried to make herself mad at the librarian again, but despite her attempts all she could manage was a general sense of irritation. There were no flames of anger scorching the back of her eyes. Part of it, she knew, was that she did not want to be angry. All she wanted was to get to her food.

Worry started crawling around in her belly, and she walked over to the edge of the room and looked down. That was a long drop, but what if she could not get down on her own? Her magic got her up here when she should not be able to do so, but that also meant no one would come up to help her down. That assumed she could even get their attention, since it was not as if she could simply yell for help.

Her feet scuffed the edge of the roof just as a gust of wind pushed against her. She hopped backwards away from the edge before she could fall—

—and a moment later had to gasp for air when she reappeared in the alleyway. Her head whipped up to stare at the roof she had just been trapped on before that burst of teleportation caught her off guard. She shook her head. Helpful, but she would rather this magic she was exploring be difficult than unpredictable.

Getting back into the library when the library was locked tight was a little more difficult, but this time her frustration caused the doors to unlock themselves just as they had the night before. Hazel gave the doors a considering look as she turned the knob to lock the door again. That was a useful trick. There were many a day at Privet Drive she would have appreciated being able to do just that to let herself out of the cupboard.

She had no intention of turning on every light in the building, but a torch would be just as useful. In a building this size, they had to have one somewhere. A quick search of the drawers in the front desk, and then she flicked the light on and shined it at the card catalog.

Another rumble from her stomach reminded her of her priorities. _Right. Food, __**then**__ magic._

* * *

**For a mute girl, Hazel can sure use a lot of words to talk about nothing in particular. I originally planned not to put her own thoughts into italics, but as I was writing it I felt leaving them out would be too much tell and too little show.**

**There shouldn't be much more of this "I did it just fine last time" stuff, but considering Apparation is considered difficult even for fully trained witches, it made sense that it takes a nine-year-old girl a few attempts to get it under control. Even Tom Riddle wasn't that ambitious.**

**Silently Watches out.**


	3. The New Me

**PencilMonkeyGaiden:** Mr. Headphones Guy was listening to a Walkman and looking at stuff on a microfilm machine. The first draft said that explicitly, then I realized that my mental picture of the scene meant Hazel couldn't see the Walkman, and she probably wouldn't necessarily recognize a microfilm reader on sight. Mr. HG wouldn't be thinking of these things, either, so she wouldn't know from his thoughts, but I liked the opening too much to scrap it.

**dvorkam:** See below for the answer to one of your questions. As for the concern of starting the story too early to the point nothing happens for a while, I actually have fairly sold-ish plans for a bunch of stuff that happens between now (December '89) and July '91 when she gets her Hogwarts letter. It's at the point that if I started with the letter, everyone would be _immensely_ confused or assume I'm talking about an OC.

**Guest:** This IS the start of an adventure. The adventure of learning about magic and the magical world without the guidance of any canon character, exploring parts of the world that canon never dwells on. That should be obvious looking at the summary and what's happened so far. Of course, if you think the last two chapters are "dark and hopeless", then obviously you've never read anything else I've written and probably won't like my style in general. I don't write stories where everything is sunshine and rainbows and nothing bad ever happens. Characters who don't have challenges and conflicts to overcome aren't worth reading about.

"**Everyone's being so mean to Hazel!":** Yes they are. Unfortunately, it's common for 'normal' people (at least according to statistics) to be wary and distrustful when they run into other people who are obviously homeless and destitute. Hazel has only been homeless for one night, but thanks to the mention in canon of Harry having ill-fitting and worn-out clothing, it gives her a head start on _looking_ homeless. Her acting jumpy and not answering questions when people talk to her (because the first assumption anybody makes, in fiction or real life, is NOT going to be "oh, obviously she's mute") feeds into the assumption a few of these minor characters have already made, that she's homeless and therefore untrustworthy.

In terms of the librarian specifically, her behavior was not with the active mindset of "I shall make this child freeze to death, mwa ha ha!". It was subconscious, where most prejudices reside, and more along the lines of "You're homeless and dirty and your kind doesn't belong in here. You can find somewhere else to stay warm where we don't have to look at you". Which fits back into the comment I made in the AN of chapter 1 about Hazel dealing with some of the challenges that runaway youth face _in real life_.

**As many (most?) of you probably know, while I may be a fanfiction author by night, I am a physician by day. You can guess then that the last several weeks have been… stressful, shall we say. I haven't had a whole lot of free time, and even when I did I wasn't in the best mindset to write. My stories will continue, but I ask for a little patience.**

**There is a lot of information and misinformation floating around on the Internet and the airwaves about COVID-19, and I won't turn this into a full lecture, but I do want to stress the most important thing you need to know: This virus. Is. Deadly. Old, young, and everywhere in between; people have and are dying.**

**Don't be stupid. Don't think only about yourself. Keep your distance from other people, tell your loved ones how much they mean to you, and above all else, just be careful. We can survive this, just as humanity has survived pandemics in the past, but that will only happen if we all use a little common sense.**

**And on that oh-so-cheerful note, let's continue with the story.**

* * *

**Chapter 3  
****The New Me**

The sun had long since set when the head librarian slid the last book into its proper shelf. Whistling to herself at a job well done and thoughts filled with images of the meal her husband said he would prepare tonight, she flipped the lights off and walked out the back door so she could lock the library up for the night. Confident that all would be as she left it when she came back first thing in the morning.

Hazel waited five minutes after all noise in the library had stopped and she could no longer hear the librarian's thoughts before she poked her head out of the boiler room.

Once she was satisfied no one was around, she crept the rest of the way out. The borrowed torch was in one hand, and she quickly clicked it on to light up the dark stacks. In her other hand, she held a tin of Spam and a plastic spoon she had found in one of the back rooms of the library. It was probably the librarians' lunch room if the microwave and coffeepot were anything to judge by. Hopping up onto the top of a nearby table, she sat with her legs crossed beneath her and peeled open the tin.

Her eyes roamed over the bookshelves in front of her while a faint frown settled on her face. It was probably getting close to time for her to move on. Partly because she had been living in this library for the better part of a week, which meant she was running out of the food she had taken from Privet Drive. Partly because what she had found so far was… less than helpful.

She started her search in the obvious place: the nonfiction section. Hazel had not expected to find anything there, and she had not been disappointed. No books about how to access hidden magical talents. No history books talking about witches as though they were real. Magic truly was something that had been lost and forgotten.

Lost, not imaginary. She had found _one_ section in the nonfiction section that provided some support for her assumptions: the folklore section. Celtic fairy tales, stories by the Brothers Grimm, even tales from the Americas or Africa. Folk tales were full of fantastical creatures and spellcasters, but in modern times they vanished. The books said it was because magic was just an explanation ancient cultures used to explain what they did not understand, and thanks to science the theory of magic was no longer needed and could be safely abandoned.

Hazel had a different conclusion. She knew magic was real; that she teleported to this library was proof enough of that. If magic used to be common knowledge and later was forgotten, that meant _something_ had happened. Maybe a war between witches and normal people that the former lost. Maybe a disease that wiped out most of the families capable of magic. Maybe whatever power flowed through her and her mother's veins had been diluted or weakened and needed centuries upon centuries to return.

No matter the explanation, her worries seemed to be confirmed. Her mother probably had to explore the limits of their ability all on her own, which meant Hazel would, too. A thought passed through her head, and she mulled over it for a moment. If she had inherited her magic from her mother, and her mother had presumably gotten it from one of her and Aunt Petunia's parents, why had that parent not taught what they knew to her mother? Why would Aunt Petunia consider it so unnatural if she grew up with it?

She shrugged, putting the question out of the front of her mind and into the mental box that contained all the other questions she had that she knew would never be answered. Maybe if she could figure out how to summon her mother's ghost – because that was something that showed up way too often in folklore not to be true – she could ask, but otherwise there was nothing more she could do about it.

The problem with trying to emulate magical beings in folklore was that none of them were the kind of people she wanted to be. Most of the witches the stories were about talked about them cursing people or brewing up poisons or doing something else horrible. They were the cause of everything bad that happened, and when they were killed life for everybody else went back to normal. That seemed to be the moral behind them all: kill the witch as quick as possible, or else things would go from bad to worse.

Not that human witches were the most dangerous things in folk tales. That would be ignoring the vampires and evil spirits and massive beasts that grand heroes had to do battle with. And the less said about the absolutely terrifying fairies in Ireland, the better. She had quickly resolved never to go there, even if the Troubles did calm down.

Once she had decided that the vast majority of the nonfiction section was worthless to her, she moved her attention to fiction. Hazel smiled at that thought. Normally anybody looking for advice in fantasy books would rightfully be laughed at, but what she as looking for there was different. She was not looking for hints on the 'hows' of magic. It was obvious she would have to come up with that on her own. She wanted ideas for the 'whats'.

If she was stuck experimenting to learn anything useful about magic, she might as well have ideas to work with. She could and would come up with her own, but there was no reason not to start with a list ready-made.

She would have been even happier with that plan if fiction had been more help, but sadly it was not. In order to get as many ideas as she could, she had been skimming more than sitting down and really reading, so it was possible she had missed something, but from what she saw witches and wizards generally fell into the same categories as they did in folklore. Either they were the villains who had to be defeated before they could destroy the world, or they were the old men and women who gave a trinket to the sword-swinging hero that would help him on his quest. No mention of how they did what they did, and the few times wizards did go on adventures, they always vanished halfway through only to pop up again at the end of the book.

Maybe it was because so many wizards in stories were based off the wizards in fairy tales? That would explain the consistency.

Licking the tin and the spoon clean, she tossed the can in the air a few times as she pondered her situation. There had to be a reason the folk tales focused on the items, and she did not think it was a lack of imagination. Could it be that the toys themselves were the real power at hand? She would be the first to admit that she knew almost nothing about magic. She could teleport, and with effort she could lock and unlock doors, but that was it. Could the reason so many magicians had magic items on hand be that there was only so much she could do with her willpower alone, so witches of yore would make these things to do more than they could by themselves?

It would explain why the stories always showed the wizard having the right tool for the job. They were already using those tools in their own lives, so when the boy hero of destiny came to them for help defeating whatever evil was threatening the land, their own trinkets were the only help they could realistically give. Thinking it through a second time, she nodded. That made far more sense than wizards being terrible packrats who just collected a bunch of junk.

It also meant she was stuck in a bad spot. She _hated_ arts and crafts. She had never shown any natural talent for the arts, and she had heard that same opinion for too many years from too many teachers whenever they were given some artsy project for homework. Unlike the other kids in her class, she had no parent who would help her or do the entire thing for her like Theresa's mom always did. Aunt Petunia would not deign to do that, and Dudley had taken so much pleasure out of ruining the first project she was ever assigned that from then on she had to work on her homework late at night when the other Dursleys were asleep. Working on drawings with glue and glitter in almost complete darkness was not conducive to marvelous works of art.

Hazel shook her head and put those concerns to the side. If she had to make stuff to use her magic the most effectively, she would deal with it later. Right now she still had things she wanted to try out. Setting the empty tin onto the table, she returned briefly to the boiler room. When she came out her hands were empty of the spoon but now held three paperback novels.

Of all the books in the library, these were the ones that were the most interesting. While most of the books she had found depicted wizards as allies and sidekicks, these had wizards as the main characters, albeit in space and dealing with aliens and laser guns. Because the wizards were the most important people, the books actually went into a little bit of detail about how they supposedly used their spells. The space wizards seemed relatively limited in her opinion – none of them could teleport, for instance, and while they could sense emotions to some degree they could not hear thoughts like she could – they did have a couple of tricks that looked useful. Clouding people's minds was a skill she could see applying to way too many problems.

But that was something to play with later. Tonight, she had two other things she wanted to try.

She closed her eyes and took a big breath, then let it out. One of the key features of the space wizards' magic was that they did not run it off their emotions. They actually claimed that using anger and fear was the road that led other magic users to become evil villains like in the other stories. Instead they were all about peace and calm, using something called meditation to 'calm their minds'.

A dictionary, an encyclopedia, and then a couple of random self-help books had told her what meditation actually was, and from there she had her next test. She could all too easily remember how many times she failed at her teleporting because she was not angry at the right thing. If she could be calm but still be in the right frame of mind to use her magic, that would make everything that much easier. Getting a spell right one time out of three or four was not a sign of a talented magician!

More deep breaths came and went, and with each one she tried not to think about anything at all. It was far from simple, but the self-help books had all said that she did not need to have a completely blank mind. She just needed not to dwell on any of her thoughts. If they poked in, she let them flit away again and focused on the calm feeling she wanted.

This was the second night she had attempted this method. The night prior, she had not quite gotten it down by the time the sun was cresting the horizon, but she felt like she was close. Now it was a new night, and she wanted to get this right!

Three times she had to hop off the table to go to the lavatory or drink a glass of water, and another time she made herself a peanut butter sandwich, but late in the night she could feel her mind relax. It was almost like she was drifting off into sleep, but she knew she was still fully awake. Instead nothing could bother her. Not here.

Opening her eyes, she looked at the tin that was still sitting on the table. _Move_, she ordered.

The tin just sat there.

A moment of frustration threatened to bubble up, but in this calm place it was easy to prick it and let it disperse into nothing. _Go away. Back up. Up?_

Still the can did nothing, and she tilted her head and looked for a different way to get what she wanted. When she teleported, she had to think about where she wanted to go and how much she wanted to be there. The few times she had tried locking and unlocking a door, she imagined a key turning in the keyhole. The second option, the key, felt right to her. Maybe she could imagine something lifting the tin instead of the tin just floating up into the air all by itself.

That thought triggered another, and she hopped off the table to go back to one of the bookcases. In her search for answers, she had found a book that did not tell a story but instead was a rulebook for some complicated board game. It talked about different characters the players could be, and some of them had magic spells, including a spell to move things. Sure enough, as soon as she flipped to the pages about the wizard character, she saw the description for a hand that would move around and touch things.

That might just work.

Back to the table she went, and she closed her eyes and focused. This time she was not thinking about nothing. One of the same books that taught meditation mentioned being mindful about the movements of her body. To create a magic hand, she needed to know how her own hand felt.

She had no way of knowing how long she sat there, curling her fingers first one by one, then two in tandem, then three. Closing her fist before opening it up again. The skin on her palm and the back of her hand stretching and curling as the bones and muscles she imagined she could feel shifted with every movement. Her fingers wiggled, sending a rippling sensation from the pinky side of her palm to the thumb side.

Hazel's eyes opened, and she closed her hand one finger at a time before opening them all at once and imagining what she wanted.

A single pinprick of light appeared above the can, and it unfurled like a flower in the spring. A flower that glowed a pale blue and had only five petals, four on one side and the last off at an angle. The petals thickened and became round, and then the new fingers relaxed.

She clicked the torch off, but the light from the ghostly hand shed no light onto the stacks. It just sat there, the only thing in her sight until she turned the torch back on with a nod of acknowledgement. It was not there for real. It was a picture in her mind, just like the key that would unlock doors. That would be fine so long as it did what she needed it for.

She crooked her index finger in an almost 'come here' gesture, and the index finger on the ghost hand did the same. A small smile came to her. That made things easier. The hand moved with her own, dropping faster than her fleshy hand, until it was only a couple of centimeters above the can. Her fingers closed as if she was holding something, her hand lifted back up...

...and the ghost hand rose up with the can firmly in its grasp.

Another gesture, and the ghost hand tossed the tin into the air and caught it as it came back down. Dropping the can so she could take it to the rubbish bin, she let the hand in her mind disappear in a puff of shimmering smoke and her smile grew into a grin and a silent laugh bubbled up in her chest. So what if she had to use a workaround? She could now _move things with her mind_!

That was enough success for tonight. She had found a few books she wanted to read for fun, and she was going to do that until she went to bed. Tomorrow she could start with the last thing she needed to say goodbye to Greater Whinging.

* * *

Her sleep that night was deeper than she had intended, and when her eyes finally opened she cracked the boiler door open to take a look out she could see that it was late in the afternoon, though there were still plenty of people in the library. Unlike every day prior, this time she actually wanted to have people around. There was no way to know if what she was about to do would work if no people were around to try it out on.

She knew her clothes were not pretty or nice, and especially not when she needed to wash them in the sink because she only brought a few sets. If she wanted to visit other libraries, she would need some spell that would keep anybody from paying attention to her and throwing her out like the librarian here had the first day she arrived. That way she could go in and out and do whatever she liked, and no one would care!

Hazel scoffed to herself as that thought fully sank in. Back in Little Whinging, she had been ignored whether she wanted to be or not, and now she had to _make_ people leave her alone. That was just typical of her luck.

Oh well. It was what it was. If nothing else, she had plenty of experience being ignored.

More than a little thought had been put into this idea, and the success in creating a magic hand the previous night had bolstered her confidence. She _could_ do this. She closed the door and then her eyes. Her breathing slowed, and with not effort but intent she pushed her anticipation away. She had to get this right. She was going to get this right.

Once she found her mind in that same calm state as she had before, she slowly and carefully called up memories of when she was ignored. One by one she looked at them, ignoring the frustration and anger and sadness that came with being overlooked and instead focusing on that nebulous feeling of being completely alone despite all the people who were around her. Like being in her own little world, she passed through crowds without eyes doing more than flick towards her for a moment before moving on.

Her chest hurt from the feeling of being so _bloody_ isolated and alone, and tears stung her eyes. Opening them up, she released all those feelings with a great exhale and a tiny silent sob.

What emerged from her lips was not air. A cloud of smoke came out, and she watched it wrap around her like a blanket that tried and failed to offer the slightest bit of comfort. She reached out a finger to try stroking it nonetheless, and just like she had the crowd, her finger slipped through the smoke without the faintest hint of resistance.

She dashed the tears from her face and shook her head. It was a picture in her mind, like the hand she made, and that was all it could ever be. Right now, it was time she got a move on. Slinging her backpack over her shoulders, she opened the boiler room door and stepped out to walk around other people for the first time in a week.

When the first person, a harried-looking woman trying to corral a trio of little kids, looked her way, Hazel could almost feel her heart skip a couple of beats in sudden worry. Her flash of fear settled back down when the woman's eyes skipped over her and she went back to the kids. A grin appeared on her lips as she walked away from the family. Here she was, wearing ratty old clothes and dirty socks, but despite all that the woman did not see anything wrong with her at all.

She was the most uninteresting thing anyone had ever seen, and she was going to take advantage of that for everything it was worth!

Hazel all but skipped the rest of the way to the front door, and a glance behind her showed that the same librarian who had chased her outside the first day she was here was once more sitting at the desk. The older woman could not see her, but Hazel nonetheless stuck out her tongue and waggled her hands on either side of her head.

Her good mood carried her as far as the door, but as soon as she opened it a gust of wind hit her and drove her back inside with a shiver. The snow on the ground had mostly melted, but it felt like it was colder now than it had been on the night she arrived! She looked down at her clothing with a mental groan. There was no way this would do her any good whatsoever to protect her from the winter winds. If it was this cold already, she could only imagine how much worse it would be tonight.

_But I can't exactly stay here, either_, she thought, hiking her backpack up again and feeling the lack of weight. _I don't have a whole lot left in the way of food, so I need to get some of that, too._

_Guess I'm headed for the Tesco._

Bracing herself this time, she opened the door and pushed herself into the terrible winds. She eventually found the main street, and from there it was relatively easy to find the familiar blue and red logo of the supermarket. This would be her one-stop shopping destination. It would have everything she needed, and more importantly she was already here and could get out of the cold.

Her concentration on her 'ignore me' spell broke on the way to the store, and when she got there she ducked around the back and huddled up beside a dumpster so she would have protection from the wind if nothing else. Out here in the cold, it was far harder to try to fall into meditation, but her desperation appeared to worked just as well as anger or fear. A stream of smoke came from her lips and wrapped around her, at least, and that was all that really mattered.

Freshly ignorable, she hurried into the store and sighed in relief at the warmth within. Clothes first, she decided. The food she could get after.

Nobody else was visible in the clothing section, but she still moved quickly to grab several pairs of jeans in a couple of sizes, just as many shirts, and a new jumper. The shoe racks were between her and the changing room, so that was a quick stop to grab a pair of trainers as well. Dashing into the changing rooms, she shut the door, locked it, and slumped against the wall. Even knowing she was effectively invisible, there was still an element of panic. She had not felt it when she was in the library, probably because she was already leaving, but getting thrown out of the store before she had everything she came here for would be a disaster.

A bit of trial and error was all it took to figure out which size of clothing she really fit into, even if the fact that the clothes were still loose on her was a bit disappointing. She knew she was smaller than everyone else in her class and that all Dudley's clothes were several sizes too big, but she did not think it was this bad. Now clad in her new outfit and looking like a real girl, she pulled the tags off the clothes and took a look at the prices listed with sinking feeling in her stomach.

She pulled out her notebook to run the sums, then she pulled out the wad of notes she had taken from Aunt Petunia's purse and counted them out. Even if she stuck only to a single outfit plus the trainers, she did not have enough, and that was not counting the coat and gloves she would need as well. Nor the food, which she absolutely could not do without.

Now she wished she had grabbed more money before she left. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon owed her warm clothes that actually fit, at the very least, not that they would have ever spent that money on her.

The thought had been one that came from a fit of pique, but the more she thought about it the more it made sense. How they treated her her entire life was the reason she had to run away in the first place. If they had been willing to give her even a fraction of the love and care they showered on Dudley, she would have been perfectly happy staying with them.

_They didn't want to spend money on me?_ She tore a sheet of paper out of her book and angrily scribbled out a note for whoever found the pile of clothes she was leaving behind. _Fine. They can make up for it now._

_Please contact Vernon Dursley for payment for the clothes.  
__His address is Number 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey._

Looking at the note again, she added the phone number for the house, and a moment later added, _"And the food I'm taking, too."_ That should cover everything she needed.

Her aunt and uncle would be furious when they heard about this, but right now she did not care. They did not want her in their home? Fine.

The least they could do was cover her expenses now that she was out of their lives forever.

* * *

Far to the north, in a place Hazel never could have imagined, stood a squat castle that had been a school of magic for near a thousand years. It was a place of wonder and danger, of beauty and dark deeds. The room at the peak of one of the shorter towers of this castle was the location of the office of the headmaster for this school, a room with squishy furniture, portraits that moved of their own accord in their gilded frames, and a wide number of knickknacks that served functions entirely mysterious to anyone except the headmaster himself.

Right now, in that room, one of those gadgets came to life for the first time in eight years. It spun like a top upon its shelf and let out a shrill whistle loud enough to wake the dead from their graves.

The previous headmasters in their frames slapped hands over their ears and screamed at each other as if one of them was responsible for the ear-rending sound. The current headmaster, the one who had set this device to monitor the status of a very specific ward and alert him if anything happened to it, would have been eager to know that his alarm was going off. Unfortunately for him, he was currently off on the Continent in the middle of a meeting of the International Confederation of Wizards, just one of the many roles he bore. For two days he had been gone, and he was not to return for another five. His phoenix, having just undergone a burning day, was sitting in his pocket in the form of a chick.

For a solid minute the device shrieked and squealed, until finally it went quiet once again. The portraits slowly uncovered their ears and sighed at the return of blessed silence, and they went back to whatever they had been doing before the onset of the noise. Sleeping, for the most part.

Portraits, it must be said, did not have the best recollection. They could remember what they knew when the memories used in their creation were added to the paint, and if bound to a specific task, they could recall what was needed to complete it. Otherwise, the goings-on of the living humans around them tended to stick in their minds for only a few hours at a time before being lost. When the headmaster of this school returned, none of the portraits would recall the alarm going off at all.

How unfortunate.

* * *

Hazel set the note down next to her clothes, and as she did she could almost feel her heart becoming lighter in her chest. It felt good, in some way, to make this break with the Dursleys. They did not want her back, and she had no intention of ever seeing them again. She was free.

Free was not the same as prepared, of course, and she popped out of the dressing room to grab a thick puffy pink coat, gloves, scarf, and several changes of socks and underwear. The tags and bags for all of these were added to all the other things she was leaving behind, and she wrapped herself in the smoke that made her unnoticeable. Her next stop was the food section; despite the three changes of clothes in her bag, she still had plenty of room for more cans and loaves of sliced bread. Batteries were next, to provide electricity to the torch she was borrowing long-term from the library.

With that, she strolled out the door of the store with no one the wiser.

The wind was still freezing cold, but bundled up as she was she could barely feel it. Instead she struck out towards the setting sun until she found a set of railroad tracks and shifted course, following the iron road as she pulled a map from her backpack. Once unfolded it revealed several dots marked on it in blue ink, the nearest of which was just two counties over.

Her time spent in the library had not been solely for skimming through fantasy books, and despite what she had found she could not entirely give up on the idea of finding some kind of teacher to help her discover everything she could do. A quick search through a few travel guides had given her a list of several sites that were supposed to be magical in some way or another. If anybody was left who could teach her, these would be the best places to look.

First on her list was of course the most classic site, one she was sure was known the world over.

It was time to visit Stonehenge.

* * *

**Telekinesis is a fun trick, and one I would dearly love in real life. Some of you might have noticed that the way Hazel is using it is very different from the almost-effortless skill Jen had. Different mental frameworks will change how people look at the world, and this seems fun to try out in a story format. Canon witches have one framework, which influences their assumptions and creates the limitations they work under; Hazel will have a different framework, but one that comes with its own limits in what she can do and how.**

**Silently Watches out.**


	4. The Stones

**Jigoku no Yami:** I have no plans to bring the Powers back into play. Not right now, anyway. We'll have to see what the muse cooks up.

**Mad Elf:** It wasn't that she couldn't find _any_ stories where wizards were proactive. It was that there was little to nothing in the books _she looked through_ where there was any explanation about the mechanics behind their magic. Also, to be totally honest, I intentionally avoided any books where the wizards were of a more blaster-y flavor. That isn't the direction this story is going.

**kyuubi7:** Hazel won't be doing any enchanting with runes, though she'll become quite adept at a different process to reach a similar outcome. Whether runes come up in some other format is something I'm still working out.

"**Mage Hand!":** Indeed. I'm actually surprised so many people recognized it off the bat like that, because I certainly wouldn't have before this year. Mostly because I've never played D&D, nor I was ever interested in it until I saw the trailers for Baldur's Gate 3. Finding out that this cool-looking game will run on D&D rules is the only reason I know anything at all about the franchise.

"**I hope Hazel doesn't lose the skills she's learning when she goes to Hogwarts":** Oh boy. I'm just going to keep my plans to myself for a little longer. It'll be more fun that way. XD

* * *

**Chapter 4  
****The Stones**

The sun had set below the horizon in front of Hazel several hours ago, yet still she walked through the deep darkness. Using the railway as her road was turning out to be a double-edged sword in ways she had not expected when she first picked it. Her initial thought had been that it was a fairly direct path to get where she wanted to go, and unlike the streets there would be no one driving along who might stop to find out where a nine-year-old was going and why she was traveling in the middle of the night.

Those advantages were still present, but unlike the smooth surface of a road, it was rough and unsteady as gravel switched to wooden ties and back to gravel. She was never sure which one her feet would hit next, providing a constant urge to keep the beam from her torch fixed firmly at her feet.

Something rustled in the dark to her side, and the torch's beam flew towards it only to reveal nothing at all.

As her heart rate slowed down just a little she took a deep breath and resumed walking. That was the reason she could not just watch the tracks. The night along the railroad was not silent the way it was back in Little Whinging. Back with the Dursleys, once the neighborhood went to bed everything was quiet. Here and now there were always rustlings or an owl's hoot or what she hoped was just the wind creating an eerie whistle. Sounds that distracted her and demanded the attention of her light.

The wind for sure this time blew again, funneled through the opening along the course of the railway and sending icy knives into her. Between her puffy coat, her gloves, and her scarf, everything between her nose and her waist was warm, but it did little for her legs and absolutely nothing for the top half of her head. _Should have grabbed a cap too,_ she thought as a shiver worked its way through her thin body. Stopping in the middle of the tracks, she stomped her feet for almost a minute to get some warmth moving around instead.

Hazel would be lying if she told herself that she was not considering turning around and walking back to Greater Whinging. Not because she planned to stay there long term, but because she had nothing with which to try warming herself up. She had no lighter nor matches to start a fire, and certainly no heater to blow warm air onto herself. Closing her eyes, she made yet another go at trying to imagine a fire springing up. Nothing happened, and she had the same results once more when she pictured a nice hearth.

Mental keys and hands she could manifest with no problem. The creation of fire, on the other hand, was eluding her no matter how hard she tried.

_How could I have forgotten something to start a fire?_, she chided herself, though she knew the truth behind the answer. She was used to having somewhere warm and dry to spend the night, whether that was Privet Drive or the library. Never in her life had she ever spent the night outdoors. Of course she could not know everything she would need right from the start.

Unfortunately, this left her with two equally unpleasant options. First, to keep walking through the dark, doing her best to keep warm, and hope that by the time she was ready to fall asleep she found someplace that had a lighter. Second, to 'jump' back to the Tesco, break in, and look for matches. It was dark enough out here that she could not guarantee she would be able to return to where she was, which meant she would have to give up the hours of progress she had made and restart her trek from the very beginning.

The idea of turning back was enough to spur her forwards. She could not turn around, not now. If she did, there was no telling where she would stop, and all that waited for her at the end of that road was Privet Drive.

The beam from her torch flickered.

Hazel's eyes grew wide, and she struggled to take her backpack off. The torch had looked like it was growing weaker for the last couple of days, so this was not unexpected, but could it not have chosen a better time to fail on her?! Finally off her shoulders, the bag dropped to the ground.

And the light went out.

_Come on_, Hazel begged as she turned the torch off and tried to turn it back on again. Anything to eke even a few more seconds of light out of it. No matter how many times she slid the switch, though, it remained stubbornly dead. _Come on!_

Something creaked in the woods, invisible in the inky blackness, and Hazel's heart raced as she crouched next to her backpack and set the torch down by her feet. She had put batteries in the bag when she was shopping, but like an _idiot_ she put them with the cans and clothes and everything else in the main pocket! Her hands shook when she finally found the zipper, and she reached into the backpack. Can, can, jeans maybe, something sharp that was probably the can opener— Where were they?!

Her desperately searching fingers finally touched slick plastic at the very bottom of the bag, and she pulled out the pack of thick batteries she picked up specifically for her torch. Grabbing both sides of the shell, she pulled and tugged with little hope for success. She had seen Uncle Vernon struggle with these all the time until Aunt Petunia convinced him to use a pair of scissors, and she knew she would not have any more success with her skinny twig arms. Giving it up as a bad job, she instead put her hands on the ground and walked them around until her fingertips found the edge of a pointed stone that felt thin enough to poke a hole in the plastic.

A shuffle of feet to the side made her jump, and she grabbed the stone and pushed the point of the stone into the plastic until it broke through. Two, three, four more times she did this until finally she could wiggle her fingers into the shell and violently ripped it apart.

Something, no doubt the batteries she needed so desperately, clattered onto the ground.

Hazel's heart leapt into her throat, and she threw the rock to the side so she could feel along the ground again. One hand found something far too smooth to be plain stone, and then the other hand found another. She needed a third hand to pick the torch back up, so instead of putting the batteries back down she shoved them into the pockets of her jacket. The torch was right where she left it, and she hastily unscrewed the head and swung the body of the torch to the side where the sound had come from.

Even if she expected them, the cracks of the batteries hitting the ground made her jump. There was no telling what was out there, what animal lurked in the shadows that thought she would make a tasty midnight snack! Her torch was now open for her, and she grabbed the first battery. _Have to get this right. Have to get this right. Where's the bump, where's… There! Bump on the top, in the torch, and the next one. Not this end. Other end, found it. And in!_ Both batteries inside the plastic case, she screwed the head back into place and flicked the switch. Bright light shot out of the light bulb, and she swung the beam in the direction where she heard all the noise.

Her light found nothing. Nothing whatsoever.

Her panting breaths were clearly visible in the now bright air, and she hugged herself and took several slow, deep breaths in the hopes that it would force her heart to stop pounding quite so hard. It was fine. _She_ was fine. There was nothing out there in the woods that wanted to eat her. The creaking and rustling she had heard was probably just the wind or some tiny animal like a mouse or something going about its business.

The last two batteries that had flown out of the package were easy to find, and this time she put them in one of the little pockets on the side of the backpack. She needed them to be easier to find the next time her torch decided to give out on her.

The brighter beam illuminated more of the train tracks and the woods to the sides, and it was with steps that certainly were not in any way faster than before that she continued on down the railroad.

It was still early in the morning, hours probably before the sun would rise and turn the starry sky blue, that the tracks shifted to the side and split off into a pair. The reason for the change became clear the closer Hazel came: she had reached the first rail station on her trek. Another shiver ran through her body, the cold coming with greater frequency the entire time she walked, and with a silent groan she pulled herself up the short wall onto the platform. This was as good a place to look around for some kind of fire-starter as any. If she found nothing, she could just keep on moving.

Walking to the front of the train station, she shined the beam of light into the night. At the very edge of the light she could see something glinting, though not well enough to determine just what it was. Hazel shrugged to herself and started walking. Her steps grew quicker the closer she got, her excitement filling her up.

It was a petrol station, and petrol stations had boxes of lighters just waiting to be bought. Even better for her, the building was dark.

She ran to the glass door and swept through the interior with her light. Sure enough, a box of plastic lighters sat right there in front of the cash register. A tug on the door proved that it was closed for the night and locked securely. No one would be able to get in without breaking through the glass.

No one without magic, that was.

Setting the torch on a brick windowsill so the light was still on the handle of the door, she dropped her backpack to the ground and took several deep breaths in with her eyes shut. She knew what she was doing. She had experimented with it back in the library. Besides her teleportation and her ability to read minds, this was the skill she had practiced most. Once she felt herself settling into a sense of calm, she opened her eyes again and pictured what she needed.

Before she closed her eyes, there had just been the handle and the keyhole. Now, there was something else added to the scene. An almost transparent key floated in the air, old-fashioned in design with thick teeth on the end of a long stem. The head of the key was not a ring like old keys she had seen pictures of. No, the head of this key was a cartoony skull wearing a smile.

Her magic could unlock any door. It was only appropriate it take the form of a skeleton key.

There was no way the teeth of this key would be able to fit in the keyhole if it were real, but all it was was an image in her mind. It slid into the hole without issue and turned. A soft click was audible, and when Hazel grabbed the handle again, this time the door swung open invitingly.

She grabbed her backpack with one hand and her torch with the other, the door propped open with one foot. A beeline to the lighters, and she grabbed two of them before thinking about it a moment longer. Three more came down, and all five of them made their way into the pocket on the other side of the backpack from the one she put her batteries into.

Hazel nibbled on her lip for a moment, indecision warring within her. The Tesco where she had gotten her new clothes was a huge business. Uncle Vernon had certainly complained about how rich the company was. This petrol station did not look anything near the same. She did not want to steal from the people who owned this, not if she could help it. Reaching into her bag again, she pulled out the thin sheaf of bills she took with her from Privet Drive and slapped a five-pound note on the counter where it would be easily seen.

There. Now she wasn't stealing. She paid for the lighters.

Locking the door behind her, she made her way back to the train tracks. There were a few more miles she wanted to cover before the sun came up and she looked for a place to rest. Except now, she could actually stay warm while she slept, even if she was stuck in the middle of the woods.

* * *

Hazel kept her eyes on the coach as it trundled down the road. She knew from prior exploration that this road led all the way back to the nearby visitor center, and based on where the sun was in the sky, this should be the last group leaving the monument. So long as she could avoid being spotted, she would have all the time she wanted without being bothered.

Over to the west, in the direction of the setting sun, stood the tall pillars of Stonehenge.

The emptiness of the plain meant that Hazel did not even need to bother with her 'ignore me' smokescreen. She simply walked in the direction of the massive monument, hopping over the knee-high rope that marked the edges of where normal tourists could go. She did not want to stand here ten feet from the nearest stone. She _needed_ to be right in the middle of the structure.

Stonehenge was on the top of her list of places to visit for a couple of reasons. One of them was simple, accessibility. Most of the places she wanted to visit were to the west of Surrey, and of them all this location was the closest. She pretty much had to pass Stonehenge on the way to anywhere of interest, so she might as well visit here first. The other reason was the history of this place. According to an old book she found in the library, it had been built by the druids, the priests and sorcerers of the ancient Celtic people. If what she read was true, they had also used it for human sacrifice, which was… icky and something she hoped was not necessary for big amazing pieces of magic. If it was, she would have to rethink whether she really wanted magic to be a main focus of her life.

Just the thought of what kind of person she would become if she dived headfirst into murder and human sacrifice made her queasy.

Regardless of its original purpose, she had to wonder about how even after years of study, nobody knew how the heavy stones that made it up had been moved from wherever they were carved. Something so extraordinarily difficult that it bordered on the impossible? That sounded like the work of magic to her.

Hazel stepped through one of the square archways and into the center of the stone circles. In the dying sunlight, this place was magnificent and awe-inspiring. But did it hold secrets for a desperate magician? That was the question of the day, and so far, nothing was jumping out at her.

Maybe it would just take time, and thankfully, she was well prepared for that. Under one arm was a good-sized collection of sticks and branches she had picked up off the ground before the woods ended and the plains began. It had taken her a couple of hours yesterday to figure out how to get a fire going with her new lighters and how to keep it lit, but she thought she had the hang of it now.

Sure enough, it only took her twenty minutes and five attempts at lighting it this time to get a little fire burning!

With her fire giving her warmth, she pulled her coat tight around her and sat on the ground with her legs crossed under her and her back against one of the fallen pillars. Her experiments with her magic hand proved how useful meditation was. Perhaps this was what she needed to get any information from these ancient stones. Or maybe once the night finally fell, something would show itself. Anything at all would be nice.

The sun sank beneath the horizon. Night took over the sky. Nothing at all happened among the massive stones.

She let out a sigh. Not surprising, but it was disappointing. Perhaps meditation would get her somewhere. Closing her eyes, she let her breathing even out and her mind clear. She wanted to be receptive to any signs or secrets this place wanted to share with her. With the fire warming her, it did not take long for her to sink into the place of calm where her meditation was supposed to take her, and she waited as patiently as she could for any hints or whispers. Surely something would come her way. Surely.

Soreness in her side and back nudged her, and after several minutes she opened her eyes and blinked in surprise. Why was the world turned sideways? Why was the sky bright? The fog in her brain slipped away, and she blinked a few more times before pushing herself upright, cursing herself in her head. It was morning! Somewhere in her meditation, she had just fallen asleep instead!

A moment of panic surged through her, and she staggered to her feet. If it was daytime, that meant there would be a tour group coming up any minute. She would be arrested for trespassing, and the police would probably make her go back to the Dursleys!

Looking out over the field, she expected to find a crowd of people looking back at her, maybe with a couple of police already in attendance. Instead, she was met with absolutely nothing. No people. No coaches. Nothing at all.

The terror receded, and actual thought took its place. She let out a quiet huff. She was worried about nothing. Of course there was no one here right now. There would not be anybody here until tomorrow.

Stonehenge was closed on Christmas Day.

She shrugged and scattered the ash and half-burnt sticks of her long-dead fire. Intellectually she knew she should be disappointed about being by herself and homeless on Christmas, but the holiday had never meant anything special to her. If anything, being alone and free was the greatest gift she had ever received. It was definitely better than being forced into her cupboard so the Dursleys could spend the day pretending she did not exist.

A few minutes spent gathering the rest of her belongings and sticking them in her backpack, and she was ready for the road again. She looked at the dirt on one side of her coat and her jeans and frowned. It might be getting time to find a building to stay in for a few days so she could wash her clothes, and she could restock her food supply at the same time. Plus, if there was a library anywhere near her, she could do some digging into whether there were any supposedly magical holidays. Yule was supposed to be around the same time as Christmas, right?

Birdsong from the trees distracted her as she was about to leave the plain on which Stonehenge was built. Over to the right, decorating the branches of three or four trees, was a large flock of bright blue and yellow birds singing to greet the day. She smiled at the cheerful sound they produced and the way they seemed to be keeping each other company.

_Come to think of it,_ she thought after a moment, _a lot of stories about witches and sorcerers talk about them having a familiar. I'd be a poor magician if I didn't have a pet of my own, wouldn't I?_

Hazel tried to whistle the same tune the birds were singing but managed only a sputtering sound. Whistling was not something she had ever tried before, and this was a terrible first attempt. About the only good thing about it was that it had not scared the birds away.

_If I can't sing them closer, maybe I can call them silently?_ It seemed to be worth a try. _Birdies! Come here._

The birds continued their song.

_Hey_, she called with more force. She had never tried to talk to anybody in their own minds, not really, so maybe she was doing the mental equivalent of whispering._ Over here! Come on, come here!_

The singing softened, then fell silent. Even though the birds rustled in the trees, it did not look like any of them were about to fly towards her. If anything, it looked more like they were about to flee, as if something had spooked them.

She stamped her foot in frustration, and that was the signal the birds were waiting for. They sprang from the tree to the air with a great flapping of wings.

_No!_, she screamed. This was not what she wanted! All she wanted was for one of them to come over and be her friend! Her eyes caught one bird that was on the edge of the flock, and she all but shouted, _You! __**Come over here**__!_

The bird she picked out dropped for a second, almost as if its wings had stopped working, but almost before she could worry about it hitting the ground and getting hurt it started flapping again. It did not follow the rest of its fellows, however. Instead it wheeled around and swerved in her direction. Its flight smoothed out in the few seconds before it backpedaled and landed gently on her finger as soon as she reached out her hand. For a moment its eyes had a foggy greyish cast to them, almost as if they were covered by a film, but a blink and it was gone.

She gave it a smile and received a short twittering in return. When her other hand rose, it gave her fingers a quick look, but as soon as she touched its yellow breast feathers with the back of her fingers it puffed up and wiggled in place in delight.

_Like that, do you?_, she asked as loudly in her head as she could. Her question got another short snippet of song. She would take that as a yes. _Do you want to stick around with me for a while? I can help you get seeds or fruit or whatever else you want to eat._

The bird cocked its head at her and jumped back into the air. It flew almost at her face for a moment, then it was out of sight. She sighed. Of course not. Nobody wanted—

A tiny weight dropped onto her head and shifted around in a circle before singing again.

The smile on her face was making her cheeks hurt, it was so wide, but she was not going to complain. _We're going to be the best of friends, you and I. I just know it_, she told the bird before hiking her pack higher on her shoulders. _Now. Let's go! There's a whole world out there waiting for us!_

* * *

**You didn't think I'd make Hazel be **_**completely**_** on her own, did you? I learned that lesson already.**

**Before anybody believes the wrong information in this chapter or calls me out on it, Stonehenge was not created by the Celts. Modern methods have dated its construction to around 3000 B.C., long before the Celts migrated to the British Isles. It also seems to be a ritualized burial ground rather than a place of sacrifice; whether the Celts even performed human sacrifice is difficult to determine as the only records of that happening are by the Romans, whom nobody trusts to give accurate information about other cultures.**

**Hazel doesn't have that modern information, though. She read an old book with the old theories about its origin and purpose.**

**Silently Watches out.**


	5. The Woods

**Araquiel:** Glad to hear I correctly captured the voice of a 9-year-old. :D I've outlined this story well to the point that she gets her Hogwarts later, and _much_ less thoroughly through late spring 1994. I want to keep plenty of room for random inspiration. I don't have any definite plans for romance because it's still so far off.

**Guest 1:** Eventually Hazel will have more options along the line of combat, but there are other ways to get to it besides going straight blaster. You'll see what I have in mind. Eventually.

"**Will Hazel go to Hogwarts?":** She will see Hogwarts at some point or another, I'm sure. ;-)

"**Was that the Imperius or just a compulsion?":** It was something in-between but in the same general family. It isn't as long or as complete as the Imperius. You could consider it a very strong compulsion which many animals would have to obey, though a human would be able to shake it off unless she put a lot of force behind it. That would require a very particular set of circumstances.

* * *

**Chapter 5  
****The Woods**

A gap existed in the line that no one sought to close, and it was in this space that Hazel stood, a blue and yellow bird on her shoulder and a bag of trail mix in her hand. With every handful she gave the sunflower seeds to her new friend and saved the raisins and chocolate bits for herself. It was a decent way to fill their stomachs and pass the time as they waited to enter the park before her.

When she had charmed her little bird to join her, she had had no idea just what kind of bird he was nor what he needed to eat. She was no bird-scientist, after all, and it was not as if she had ever made birdwatching a hobby before she left Privet Drive for the road. Thankfully, she did not need to be. A library was conveniently between Stonehenge and her next destination, and not only was that a nice place to wash her clothes and hole up through the storm that came blowing through the day after Christmas, it also gave her a chance to check on the needs of her new friend.

According to all the bird books she could find, she had as her new familiar a European blue tit, and a healthy specimen too if his bright colors were any indicator. She did not actually know for sure if the bird was a boy or a girl – all the books said the genders looked similar unless she used ultraviolet light, which was just _so_ common around her – so in an effort not to name him or her something super silly she had instead decided on the name Morgan.

She took another handful of the trail mix and split it between them, doing her best to ignore the guilt that welled up with each bite. Needless to say this bag of food was one she took rather than bought, but she was not sure what else she could do. After paying for her five lighters, she had a grand total of thirty-eight quid to her name from the money she took from Aunt Petunia. With no way to get more short of finding it or taking it from somebody else, the only options she had to feed herself was to take the food instead. It was not as if she could go out and get a job even if she wanted to be stuck somewhere forever.

The fact that it was a necessity did not make her feel any better about sneaking in and taking things, though.

The people around her started moving again, and it was easy to let the crowd all but carry her to the entrance of Shervage Wood. The library in Greater Whinging had some information on this place, but the library in Nether Stowey had been much more helpful in confirming her information. According to the stories she read, there once had been a massive serpent or dragon called the Gurt Wurm living in this forest and the hills nearby, one that ate sheep and cows in the nearby fields and would do the same to anybody who tried to enter its woods. No one had been brave enough to fight the creature until one old woman tricked a woodsman into going into the forest to chop down some of the trees. While taking a break from his chopping, the fallen log he sat on started moving, and he hacked it in half with three blows from his axe before he could realize that he was sitting on the snake rather than a tree. She would think that the first blow would have been enough to figure out this was a flesh-and-blood creature and not a log, but the story also said he was drinking heavily before he went into the woods, so she supposed that was as good an explanation as any.

And supposedly the creature had laid a mighty egg sometime before its death.

Hazel knew the chances of finding an unhatched dragon egg were slim to none at best, and even if she did find it, she would want to stay far, far away. Regular eggs went rotten after a short time out of the refrigerator, and this all happened several hundred years ago. What she really wanted was to find something, anything, that could serve as proof that dragons really did exist back in the day. They for sure were all gone like the dodos, that much she knew. Giant bloodthirsty fire-breathing flying lizards were one of those things that would be hard for anyone to miss. It was more that if she could prove even to herself that such creatures once lived, it was a sign that smaller, less obvious magical beasts and monsters might still be around.

The line continued forwards, and she slipped through the entrance behind a family of five. All of that family were nicely dressed, new-looking clothes and hiking boots that did not have a speck of dirt on them. Not that it would be hard to miss considering the youngest girl's bright pink mud boots, though as any three-year-old would be she looked eager to get dirty. There was also a prominent bulge in the father's back pocket.

_"Damn it, Michelle,"_ the man thought over the chattering thoughts of his kids and wife, all of whom were commenting on the trees and bushes around them. _"Why do we have to be out here? I told her if I finished working on the Bruckheimer account early, we could count on another five or even ten thousand pounds added to my bonus. And it'd be a lot more comfortable than being out in the woods in the middle of winter."_

Hazel bit her lip and fell behind the family several yards before looking around to see if anyone was watching and dropping the grey mist that had kept anyone from seeing her. Anyone around probably would have been surprised when a girl suddenly appeared from thin air, but thankfully for her there was nobody watching. It looked and sounded like this was a family that was not hurting for cash. They would not notice a few pounds getting 'lost'.

Right?

Letting the distance stretch farther, she curled the fingers of her right hand closed, starting with her pinky and ending with her thumb. Opening her hand again manifested her magical hand, hovering right over the man's pocket. She took a big, quiet breath in and let it out, then both her hands dipped down and squeezed as if trying to pinch something between her fingers. When her magic hand moved up again, it held a nice leather wallet in its grasp.

The father, still preoccupied with his internal griping and ignoring the natural beauty around them, just kept walking. Completely oblivious.

The ghost hand and the wallet streaked towards her, and she wrapped her real hands around it so the family would not see it even if they turned around. Only when it looked like she was safe did she open it. Any hopes of taking just a small amount of money were immediately dashed: the smallest note in the main compartment was a tenner, and she saw several more twenties and even a fifty peeking out.

The bite turned into a nibble as she looked back and forth between the wallet and the family. It was tempting, there was no mistake about that. _Very_ tempting. If he carried this much cash on him, he might not even notice if one of the score notes went missing.

Hazel shook her head. No. He might sound like a jerk, but she would not take that much money from him and his family. Another little pocket was on the inside, and a quick check with her finger found that it contained coins. That was more palatable. Pulling one coin out, she pocketed it without looking at it and sent her ghost hand over to slip the wallet back in his pocket when his wife distracted him with looking at a curiously twisted tree.

Her crime committed, she breathed out more smoke and slipped unseen off the trail between the trees. Answers to her questions were not waiting for her on the common paths, and if she were honest with herself she wanted more distance between her and the people she just robbed. Only once she could no longer see and could barely hear anyone else in the park did she pull the coin out of her pocket to look at it. What had she grabbed? A ten pence? A fifty?

Opening her hand, she stared in surprise at the two-pound coin gleaming in her palm.

_Okay. That's more money than I expect—_

Her thought was cut off as her feet slipped off a wet rock, and before she could catch herself she went tumbling down the hill on which she stood. Stones and fallen branches slapped at her. Something jabbed her in the side with a sharp _snap_. Her hair was snagged and tugged, and she finally rolled to a stop as something crunched beneath her.

She spat a few strands of hair out of her mouth and opened her eyes. Vague blurs greeted her, and she blinked her eyes several times to try to clear them before a sense of dread overtook her. The hand not holding the coin rose to touch her face and found skin and eyelids, not the smooth plastic of her glasses.

Hazel now had a good guess as to what that last crunch was, and she rolled over off her back and felt around the dirt and muck. Sure enough, after about a minute of searching her fingers felt something that was anything but natural. One half of her glasses was in her hand, the bridge cleanly snapped, and she rubbed the dirt off the lens with the tail of her shirt before putting it over her right eye so she could see something. The left half was in even worse shape when she finally spotted it, the leg twisted to the point she knew she would be unable to wear it.

A flash of panic and worry ran shivering down her spine at the thought of being all but blind. One half of her glasses was not going to be enough to see what she was doing, and there was no way her money would be enough to buy a new pair. Nor could she just steal some. It had been a while since Aunt Petunia had taken her to get this pair, but she remembered that every pair of glasses needed their own prescription. Taking one at random would be just as bad as wearing none at all.

Cradling the halves of her glasses in her hands, she pulled at her magic to do _something_. To make a new pair or un-break these. That would be even better, and with the panic she knew was still coursing strong through her, she pulled at it. _Fix them. Fix them. Fix them, fix them, fix them fix them fix them fix them fixthemfixthemfixthem!_

A shattering sound came from nowhere, and threads of crackling lightning erupted from her hands and danced along the outline of the frame. This bright green lightning was the only thing she could see clearly, and that more than anything else was the hint she needed to figure out what it was.

This was not real. Like her key or her hand or her smoke, it was just something in her head that she saw when her magic was doing something.

The frame of her glasses twisted in her hands, and when the lightning died out she moved them closer to her face and slipped them on. The left lens was covered in filth, so she still could not see anything out of it, but other than that they seemed fine to her.

A furious tweeting came from nearby, and she looked up to find Morgan sitting on a nearby bush, his feathers puffed up and his little brown eyes glaring at her. He did not look injured or hurt at all, but evidently he had not appreciated the wild ride down the hill.

_I'm sorry_, she told him with just a bit of an edge to her 'voice'. _I didn't __**mean**__ to fall off the hill, you know. It just happened._

She picked herself up and wiped the dirty lens as best she could. A little stream or something would not go amiss, somewhere she could wash her glasses and get them really clean, but she could see. That would do for now. Looking up at the smear she left when she fell down the hill, her eyes landed on a sapling that was bent and broken at the base, its few remaining leaves pressed against the ground as if a girl had rolled over it in an uncontrolled fall.

_I'm sorry_, she told the baby tree with much more sincerity than she had used addressing her familiar. A closer look showed that the tree was not completely broken, but only a few strips of wood held the bulk of it connected to its roots. She picked the sapling up and set it upright, but despite looking better she knew the moment she let go it would tip over again. There was no way it was going to live, not destroyed like this.

Sucking on her lip for a moment, Hazel tried unsuccessfully to let her eyes unfocus for a moment to glance at her glasses. She had no idea how much her glasses looked like they used to, but they seemed to be fixed. Could she use that same magic to try fixing the tree? Glasses were not alive like a tree was, but plastic and wood were not _that_ different.

It was worth a try if nothing else, she decided, and she braced the top part of the sapling against her shoulder while she wrapped her hands around the pieces of the tree above and below the break. She knew she could do this now, and with that confidence pushing her forward it took just a little focus to bring the lightning back. It sparked and spat around the break, and she watched as the splinters of wood realigned themselves and reformed into a solid stem. On the outside of where the break had been visible there was now a puckered line of lighter brown, almost like a scar on the surface of the bark.

She pulled her hands away from the newly repaired sapling and glanced between the tree and her hands. She would have assumed that healing an entire try would be more work, more focus, more _something_ than fixing a pair of plastic glasses. If anything, it felt… easier.

Something niggled at the back of her mind. From what she read about the druids when she was researching Stonehenge, they were Celtic sorcerers but also seemed to have a connection to nature. Was that the explanation? Did her powers work better on this tree because she and her mother were descendants of druids?

It was not the strangest assumption she had ever made about her powers. She knew that game book or whatever was not real, just make-believe, but she could not help but remember that even that had a nature wizard. This was something that needed more investigation.

_What do you think?_, she asked Morgan, who was still sitting in the bush. _I'd say I'm about as off the beaten path as I can possibly be_.

She was not expecting any kind of response from the bird – she was just thinking, after all, not talking – so it was a surprise when he gave her a snippet of song and fluttered off the branch back to her shoulder. That sounded very much like an agreement to her.

_Okay, then. Onwards to maybe find a dead dragon!_

Hazel had no way of knowing how much time she spent wandering among the ancient trees after setting off from the path, but if she had to guess she would say she spent two or three hours darting around and overall just enjoying herself before she found something decidedly… odd.

In the middle of the trees stood a random clearing, perfectly circular and easily visible, as if the sun were peering through the canopy and shining a sunbeam onto grass that should not still be so green in the middle of winter. Except, she noticed when she looked up, there was no break in the branches and no sunlight streaming through the thick layer of clouds in the sky. Within that circular clearing stood another circle, but this one was made up of six stone pillars. Pillars that looked suspiciously like some of those she had seen at Stonehenge.

Pushing her way through the random bushes, she stepped onto the springy soft grass of the clearing and took a long look at the pillars. On the outsides were sections that she supposed was writing at some point, but most of the letters had been worn away by time, and what few sections were left were words she did not understand. Maybe they were even a different language; she had no way to know. Whatever these pillars had to say, it was lost forever, and she doubted she would be able to fix this as easily as she had her glasses and the tree.

The inside of the pillars were a different story. Or, more literally, the same story.

Stepping inside the ring, Hazel blinked in surprise at the carvings still visible. They were worn, just as the outside had been, but these carvings were not fragile letters. They looked like scenes out of a picture book. One pillar showed nothing but a snake-like head with curling horns, its mouth open as flames shot out over the gap between the pillars and reappeared on the one to the right, now consuming a house. Moving to the left, the next pillar showed a serpentine body with a pair of wings rising up, but below the body were people with bows and swords. Knights, fighting this monster?

She continued walking in an anticlockwise direction. The pillar past the knights showed more men, these armed not with weapons but with thin rods they held over their heads. Magicians, she thought with excitement. That made so much more sense than some random woodsman killing this beast. It was a giant effort between lots of people, both magicians and not. The stone after that held the tail of the snake, and this time there were not just men but women as well, staves in their hands and not wearing much in the way of clothes if the round breasts on display were anything to go by. The last pillar showed one man, again in robes, holding an oblong shape and handing it to a childlike figure with long ears and a long nose.

She really, really wished those carvings had not been worn away now. Why were there two different groups of – she assumed – magic users? Did they use magic differently? Why were there only women in the last group with the staves? Was one of them a group of druids, and if so, which one was it and what was the other group? Why was the truth about the killing of the Gurt Wurm hidden from everyone? Was that shape on the last pillar the egg she read about? Was it being handed to an elf or a dwarf or something? Why?

She had so many questions and naught in the way of answers.

After a moment, she realized that was wrong. She did have _one_ answer, and it was the answer to the most important question she had. Was there at one point a group of magic users, taught and trained and working their craft outside of folk tales and storybooks? Clearly the answer was a resounding yes.

The magic of this place was still intact, and that made it better than Stonehenge to try her hand yet again at meditation. If nothing else, it felt like a more comfortable place to spend the night than the well-trod ground at the more famous circle.

She held a finger out for Morgan to climb onto, and then she gave him a light toss into the air. _You might want to make yourself comfortable. Either I'll find something, or it'll be a long night._

Only then did she take her backpack off and set it outside the stones, then sat herself in the exact center of the circle. She closed her eyes and took several breaths in and out to put herself into the proper state of mind.

It was time to see if this place had any secrets to tell her.

* * *

The following morning, Hazel and Morgan left the stone circle and headed southwest.

Despite hours and hours trying to meditate in what was so clearly a place that magical people had touched, she had nothing to show for it. No hidden knowledge, no responding brush of magic, not even a new question that needed answers. Nothing.

She was starting to question whether her initial assumption about the value of meditation was on point or just very wrong. That doubt plagued her through the three days of travel required to reach her next destination, this time yet another forest that had a reputation of magic. Unlike Shervage Wood, Wistman's Wood's supposed history was much darker and bloodier. It was rumored to be a site of druidic magic and sacrifice, a forest covered in moss and inhabited by unnaturally venomous adders and demonic dogs and restless spirits. Numerous people who had visited the site and written of their experiences all suggested the same thing: this was a place of terrible, frightening power.

It was the second little forest on her list, and she could only hope it would yield as much or more knowledge than Shervage Wood had.

No one else seemed to be interested in touring this wood, not like the line she had needed to navigate a few days prior. Passing by a large stone with old writing carved into it, she slipped into the shade provided by the stumpy oak trees covered by moss and vines. Shervage Wood was more beautiful, but this? This was far more mysterious.

Morgan let out a curious snippet of song when she stopped and closed her eyes for several seconds before moving on again. _I don't know what I'm looking for,_ she admitted. _Maybe I'm wasting my time. Maybe I'm just doing this wrong. I don't know. I'm going to try doing this one more time and try it a few different ways, and if nothing still happens, we'll give it up as a bad job. But first I want to make sure I'm in as magic-y a place as I can find. Best chance of something happening._

Every thirty or forty feet she stopped and waited with her eyes closed as she hoped for something to give her a hint of what direction she needed to go. She clambered over rocks, slipped on patches of moss, ducked beneath low tree branches. For an hour she moved through the woods, the only strange feeling she got the one of being watched. Try as she might, she could not find where the source of that feeling was coming from.

Pushing through a thin wall of branches, Hazel stopped in her tracks and blinked at the sight before her.

In the middle of the forest in front of her burbled a little stream running a crooked course between the outcroppings of rock, and above it the canopy broke up more than anywhere else in the forest to send more than just dappled light onto the water. Closing her eyes once again, she waited. And waited.

Was there maybe a little hint of a strange feeling in her mind? She could not honestly say if she really felt different or if it was all in her imagination.

A huff, and she slipped her backpack off and sat down on a nearby rock that was not completely encased in thick moss. Even if it was all in her imagination, she was tired of wandering around. _Last chance, Hazel. Make it count,_ she told herself. Doing her best to ignore Morgan shuffling around on her shoulder, she closed her eyes and focused.

With all the practice she had gotten over the last few weeks, it did not take her long to push away her worries and her doubts and find that floaty feeling of calm. That was no different than it had been since she started doing this in Greater Whinging. It certainly did not get her any closer to what she wanted.

_Time to try something new then_. When she was meditating, it was by its nature a passive act. She was not doing anything, just reaching for a sense of balance. Maybe she needed to be more active with it. How would anything know it needed to talk to her if she did not tell it she was there?

She could imagine what she looked like sitting on the rock: a dirt-stained girl in stolen clothes, big plastic glasses and roughly cut hair. Now she imagined something else, a wave of white light bursting off her as if a bubble of magic was lifting off her skin. The bubble popped, sending the magic in all directions with a silent pop.

She waited, and waited, and waited. No answering call. No whispers in her mind. Nothing. After several minutes, she imagined the bubble again, and again it popped. Still nothing. The next time, she held the bubble in place. Was the pop not the key, but the bubble itself, and she kept it around for too short a time to get any response?

Several minutes passed before she quit imagining the bubble. This was doing no good.

Another idea she had on the trek from one wood to another had been trying to breath in any nearby magic, but while that was a decent idea, she had no idea how she was supposed to find the magic in the first place to try breathing it in. Plus that should have worked while she was meditating in the middle of that stone circle, and nothing had happened.

_Mum and I might be born druids,_ she reminded herself. She could heal plants. Her mum had made flowers move and turned a teacup into a mouse, a living thing. Could she just be doing it wrong? To get in touch with the magic of this place, of nature, did she need to be like nature?

Her body was already sitting straight like a tree trunk, and now she gave herself roots. Crooked and twisted roots shot down from her imagined self into the rock and earth. Trees needed roots to suck up water and vitamins and other stuff from the ground. She would use her own roots to try sucking up a little teeny bit of magic.

The sound of the wind blowing through the trees and the faint splashes of the brook against the rocks changed. It was not sudden, not extreme, but slowly the noises grew louder. The feeling of the trees surrounding her pressed tighter against her. It was as if the whole forest was closing up around her, squeezing her in the middle. But not cruelly, not as if it was trying to hurt her. More as if the forest had suddenly come alive and was trying to wrap her up and keep her with it and never let her go.

It was no secret whispered into her ear, but it was a feeling of acceptance and belonging. Or maybe it was all in her head.

Twittering in her ear threatened to distract her from this feeling, but the more she tried to shut it out the louder it got. A mental fog broke open as she realized it was Morgan she was hearing, and it was not his normal song but something more along the lines of a shriek. What had gotten into him?

A splash, louder than the normal water sounds, came from right in front of her.

Hazel opened her eyes, not sure what she was expecting to see. Whatever it was, it was not what she found. Standing in the middle of the stream was a large dog or wolf-like creature, its coat a solid black from nose to tail. The fur was ruffled and spiky, and it looked almost like it was smoldering, for here and there little wisps of dark smoke were rising. Its eyes were enormous, taking up most of its cheeks, and unlike the brown of blue of a normal dog they were a bright red that seemed to glow in contrast to its dark fur and pulsed slowly, growing dimmer and brighter by turn. As if the color and glow were not enough, it did not have round pupils like a dog or slits like a cat. The pupils were thick rectangles sitting on their sides, almost like a goat.

The dog-creature opened its mouth to let its pink tongue hang out and show off its long, yellowed fangs.

Oh. Right. Wistman's Wood was said to be inhabited by creatures called _hellhounds_.

Her immediate reaction to coming nose-to-snout with this beast was to ready herself to jump through space, but it was not coming any closer. It was not growling. It was just staring at her, as if it did not know what to do with the girl who had wandered into its domain.

The lack of attacking was not reassuring at all to Morgan, who had quit his warning calls and was now huddled up like a ball of puff at the junction of her shoulder and neck.

The hellhound tilted its head, and she tilted her own to match. Was it hungry, maybe? What did it even eat? Probably meat, and lots of it, but even then it still had not lashed out.

An idea came to her, and even knowing it was stupid she still did not have any better plans. Never taking her eyes off the hellhound's, she unzipped her backpack and pulled out the mostly empty bag of trail mix. A little shake told her just how little was left, but nevertheless she poured the last of the nuts and chocolates and raisins into her left hand and stretched it out towards the smoking wolf.

The hellhound took its eyes off her and looked down at her palm, then back at her face, and back at her palm. Its paws splashed in the water when it came closer, its head now nearly close enough for her to reach out and pet. Not that she would because the size of its mouth and teeth meant it would not have any trouble biting off an unwanted hand. The wet black nose approached the trail mix and took several deep sniffs.

A moment later it snorted, and the hot, sour breath it let out was foul enough Hazel could not keep herself from gagging.

Something wet smeared itself over her hand, and she looked down to find the food gone and replaced by a coat of thick, sticky spit, trails of it stretched out between her fingers. Her face scrunched up in disgust. The hellhound, on the other hand, just turned around and bounded off, splashing through the stream before it vanished into shadows that looked much too small to hide such a big creature.

_That went well,_ she told herself and the songbird still pressed into her neck. _Gross, but hey, we didn't get eaten. That's something to be happy about._

_Let's get out of here before that changes._

* * *

**In case you were wondering, all the sites Hazel will be visiting for the next several chapters are real places in England. Admittedly, some creative license may be taken here and there to make it a little more interesting to read about, but that's just how fantasy fiction rolls sometimes.**

**Silently Watches out.**


	6. The Ruins

**ro781727:** How the Trace works and is applied is extremely inconsistent throughout canon. My headcanon is that it is applied to the wands themselves when on Platform 9 3/4, so the main use of the Trace is to keep wizards of school age from casting magic all over the place when they are on holiday. There are other ways to detect magic to some degree, primarily for Apparation without a license or in front of Muggles or magical events big enough that the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes needs to be called in, but these methods are not person-specific like the Trace.

**"Sign language":** A few people now have asked whether Hazel will learn sign language. There are two big issues I see with this. First, the majority of people do not know sign language, so she would have to go out of her way to find people who could understand her. Second, she has no reason to go looking for it. She already has a means to communicate: writing, which everyone can understand unlike sign language. It also isn't like she's deaf and needs to know sign language to be communicated to. She can hear just fine, she just can't speak back.

So no, Hazel will NOT learn sign language unless someone can point out a major benefit to her that I'm overlooking.

* * *

**Chapter 6  
The Ruins**

The sun had already vanished below the horizon not quite an hour before when Hazel set foot in the town of Tavistock. There was nothing special that drew her to this place; it was simply somewhere to stop and rest for the night. She had initially planned to sleep in a little village called Peter Tavy, which was along the more direct route from Wistman's Wood to her next destination – and was supposedly haunted to boot! – but taking stock of her supplies she had found that she was running out of food again. Tavistock was not a large town, but it was bigger than Peter Tavy and would have somewhere she could stop to grab stuff to eat.

Street lamps were already lighting up the streets, and she kept a wary eye out as she wandered down the pavement. She was not worried enough about being seen to cloak herself in the grey smoke of her invisibility, but neither was she interested in the police coming to find her. School may have started already, and there was no way she was giving up her newfound freedom to sit in a classroom all day. Truant officers were therefore a legitimate concern.

The wind blew again, colder even than the last time and with a dampness that spoke of coming snow. She ducked down an alleyway and huddled against the brick wall. She had spent a few nights out in the elements since leaving Little Whinging, but when the worst weather came through she always tried to duck into a building to sleep. She did not trust herself to get through a snowy winter night without some kind of cover. That seemed like a wonderful way to turn herself into a popsicle.

Without warning, the door on the opposite wall a little ways deeper into the alley opened up, and an older man wearing a black apron and a white shirt stepped out. The large rubbish bag over his shoulder was flung into the dumpster nearby, and he turned enough that his eyes fell onto her.

"_Dear god!_"

Hazel flinched back at the sound of his thought. That was a sharper reaction than she had earned since leaving Privet Drive. She _should_ have made herself invisible.

A moment later, the flash of fear left. There was nothing here to really fear. If he tried to do anything, she could always teleport somewhere else in a single jump. Not to mention that other than the Dursleys, most adults preferred to ignore her. So long as he stuck to yelling at her to go away, she would be fine.

"_Calm. Calm_," the man continued in his own mind. "_Can't scare her away_. Hello, little one." He raised one hand slowly in a tiny wave, the care of his movement odd but fitting with the voice he had used when he finally spoke to her. It was the voice of someone trying to tease a wounded kitten out from behind a box. "Mighty cold out here tonight, isn't it?"

She gave him a strange look back before surreptitiously looking down at her clothes. Was something on her that was making him react so strangely? Her jeans were dirty from several days out on the road, and her coat had grime shoved deep into the creases of the puffs, but she did not look that bad.

He must have noticed her look because his face crinkled and his small frown grew. "I think I have some soup left inside. _Good thing I didn't dump the pot yet_. Be nice to get something warm in your belly, wouldn't it? _Come on, girlie. Please just come inside. All I want to do is help_."

That last thought drew a blink from her. Most of his thoughts were throwing up red flags of stranger danger, but that put everything in a different light. There was little chance that could be a trap, though. It was not as if he routinely came around mind-readers. She took a single step closer, then a second.

"_There we go. That's a good girl_. Come on, lass. Don't want you freezing to death."

Thinking the matter over again, she shrugged to herself and approached much less tentatively. It was not as if he could do anything to trap her here even if he wanted too. She had jumped from a locked cupboard to the kitchen the night she left the Dursleys. It followed that she could get out of any locked room.

The man stepped backwards when she got closer, holding the door open for her until she crossed the threshold. The room she entered was full of gleaming steel counters and cooking things and strange gizmos, obviously the kitchen of some restaurant or something. "Have a seat," he said, pulling a stool closer to one of the counters and grabbing a spoon from a plastic rack. "_Not the broccoli and cheese. Too rich for her stomach_. I'll be right back. _The beef soup. That'll do_."

The man turned away and hustled along the counter for a moment and around a corner deeper into the building. With him out of sight, she glanced around until she could see her reflection in the polished refrigerator. She frowned in confusion while looking it up and down. What had disturbed him like that? Sure, her cheeks were a little sunken in, the bones above more prominent than before, but not to the point that she looked like a skull or something.

He returned before she could think too much on that, a bowl in one hand and a plate in the other. The plate had chunks of bread on it along with a glass of water, but it was the bowl that really caught her attention. Steam rose from it, bringing a scent to her nose that instantly made her stomach growl. The spoon was in her hand almost without a thought. Her eyes rose briefly to glance his way only to find that he was very intentionally not looking directly at her, as if he thought she would run if he watched her eat.

The spoon dipped into the soup, rose, and moved to her mouth. Flavors so basic and yet so foreign to anything she had eaten lately swept over her tongue. A second spoonful quickly followed, then a third and a fourth and a fifth.

"_Poor thing acts like she hasn't eaten in a year_."

His words hit her ears, and she slowed down enough to focus on what she was doing. In what felt like only seconds, she had downed half the bowl, and one of the pieces of bread was in her other hand dripping with broth after having been dunked in the soup. The flavor of beef, beans, and spices still danced in her mouth, and if anything her stomach felt even emptier than before she started eating.

Unease wormed into her belly alongside the food and squirmed. She had tried to avoid stealing as much as she could, which meant making the food she did take last as long as she could. Even before she escaped from her cupboard, she had gone a week without any food whatsoever. When was the last time she had eaten a full meal? A month? Longer, considering the Dursleys always gave her the smallest portion of whatever Aunt Petunia cooked?

On the one hand, no wonder she was hungry now. On the other, if she was wolfing down whatever was put in front of her, clearly she needed to eat more. And if that meant stealing more often...

"Don't worry about running out," the man told her, now sitting on a stool. His thoughts were not words, just a tide of sorrow. "There's plenty more where that came from."

She returned to her meal, though not quite as hasty as she had been. If nothing else, the slower pace let her savor the flavor.

Her ravenous appetite started flagging at the end of the third bowl of soup, and she waved off a fourth when it was offered. She was comfortably full now, even if she had no idea where she had just put it all, and she did not want to overstuff herself and tempt all of it coming back up. Only once she leaned back against the wall to the side did she look up and find the man still looking at her with sad eyes. A brittle smile came to his face. "Feeling better?"

Hazel gave him a nod.

"I bet. _Not that it will do a lot. One good meal will only go so far_." He leaned forwards, propping his elbows on his knees. "You know, you don't have to live out on the streets. If you want some help, I can get in touch with someone I know. She can help you out. Warm, dry place to stay. Food every day. _I hope Karen still works at that shelter, anyway. It isn't a long drive from Plymouth. Might be able to come by tonight, or at the latest tomorrow_. What do you think? Sound good? _Please say yes. She can help get in touch with the girl's family too, I bet_."

She shook her head, doing her best to ignore the last thought. He had no idea what her life had been like with the Dursleys. It was not a threat, that thought, just him trying to help as best as he knew how. She appreciated the sentiment, but he did not understand that that form of help was the last thing she needed. For the first time in what felt like a long time, she slipped the backpack off her shoulders and dug into it for her pad of paper and a

pen.

_"I'm going somewhere,"_ she wrote before turning it so he could read.

"_Homeless, hungry, and can't talk. Terrible_." The man nodded his head, acting as though his thoughts were not affecting him. "Going somewhere, huh? _Family, maybe? Someone who can take care of you?_ It would be faster getting there by car rather than by foot. _That way if there isn't someone there, somebody can still take you to safety_."

_"I'm enjoying the trip."_

His bottom lip slipped into his mouth. "_Should just call Karen anyway, but I don't know how I'd keep her here. Wouldn't do any good to call the police. Saw them chase that other guy out of town for no good reason. Don't want them near a slip of a girl like this. She looks like she'd get hurt by the wind blowing the wrong way_."

The pen was already moving as she wrote out her next, and probably last, statement. _"I need to get moving again. Thank you for the food. I really appreciate it."_ She held up the page long enough for him to read it, then slipped both the pad and the pen back into the pack. It was the truth. She did appreciate his kindness, accepting a total stranger into what she assumed was his place of business and giving her food just because she looked like she needed it.

But just because her freedom was hard, harder than she expected when she first set out, did not mean she wanted to give it up. It was better than anything else in her life had ever been.

"_Agggh_. At least take something with you. Come on." He waved for her to follow him to the rear of the building. "_I can at least make sure she doesn't starve for a couple of days_."

The rear of the building turned out to be its front, and she stepped into the brightly lit front of a deli. While she admired the red and white tiles, the man quickly sliced two loaves of bread and stacked them high with meat and cheese, followed up with fresh slices of lettuce and tomato. Once both thick sandwiches were made, he wrapped them up in wax paper and handed them over with a conflicted expression on his face. "If wherever you're going doesn't turn out right," he slowly said, "you can always make your way back. That offer to get you some help will still be here."

Giving him a bright smile, she slipped the sandwiches into her backpack and with barely a second thought stepped forwards to give him a hug. He was surprised at the sudden gesture, but in her eyes he deserved it. Here he was, a total stranger, and in the last half hour he had been kinder to her than her own family or anyone who knew her growing up in Little Whinging. She pulled away and gave him a nod.

She highly doubted she would wind up taking him up on that offer, but it was good to have it in her back pocket just in case.

A few steps out the front door, she stopped and looked back at the deli. Was there anything she could do, any bit of magic that she had that would repay his kindness? None came to mind, but maybe there was something else she could do. Laying her hand on the brick wall, she closed her eyes and let out a deep breath.

_This man is kind_, she said to anything that might be listening to a little witch like her. _He did a good turn for someone he didn't know out of nothing but the goodness of his heart. That should be worth something, some little reward. His business matters to him. Let it succeed. Let it grow and prosper, so his kindness is returned to him many times over_.

Her eyes opened, and she pulled the backpack higher on her shoulders. She had no idea if that would work, but it was all she had to give back. Hopefully it would do something.

* * *

Waves crashed against the nearby shore, and a dark rain pelted ground that was normally safe from the water. Hazel had to shield her eyes to look out over the turbulent waters to find the narrow footbridge that led from the mainland to the tiny spit of land and the steep, narrow stairs that led higher to the ruined castle on the peak.

She almost wanted to slap herself. In hindsight, she really could have chosen a better time to visit the remains of Tintagel Castle.

The stone bridge was slick beneath her feet, but at least there was nobody else around. She had watched the ancient site for most of the day, and it was shocking how long people were waiting to take a look at the site. The crowds finally cleared out as the dark storm clouds rolled in, but even then she chose to wait until the staff were likewise absent. Considering she had seen people showing tickets to enter, they likely would not think kindly of her trying to sneak in.

Another wave washed over the stones and threatened to wash them away into the cold sea. She knew that was unlikely to happen this night, not when it had survived for hundreds of years, but nevertheless the flow of the water pushed her into crossing the bridge quicker than she had been. Once across the bridge, she just had to climb up a set of downright treacherous steps, and then she would be inside the remains of the castle where King Arthur himself was born.

As soon as she set her feet on the stairs, a nasty wind blew and forced her to huddle against the cliff face in which they were built. The stairs themselves were steep, uneven, and slick with the rain. She did not want to chance falling backwards and tumbling down. She could fix her glasses and a tree, but that did not mean she wanted to try doing the same with a busted skull.

Lightning flashed, glinting off the wet steps beneath her, and when the thunder cracked she took the last step and stood on the broken stone and the grass on the top of the island. Without the moon above, she had to rely on her torch for light, even if the frequent blasts of lightning provided its own eerie glimpse at the rest of the landscape. The unrelenting rain did not improve her visibility any.

Crouching down behind a ruined wall, she pulled the map of the site from her back pocket and opened it underneath her bent torso so she could keep it as dry as possible. Not that it was going to be any drier than anything else on her, and sure enough the colored inks were already starting to run through the sodden paper. She could still make out the overall layout of the island, but the small numbers were gone, so she had no idea what any of the structures actually were. She was essentially walking around blind.

Thunder burst around her once more, and she wiped her growing strands of hair off her face and glared up at the storm for a brief second before her glasses were too smeared to see out of them. _This is a bad idea_, she decided after a moment. _It's too dark and too rainy to see anything. I don't know if I'd be able to find any signs of magic even if the were there_. Nor did she think she could stop and meditate. The raindrops pelting her were distracting enough as it was, and the crackling storm above her had its own strange, almost frightening power that she expected would mask any subtle feelings of magic.

_I should probably call it quits and find somewhere dry, but…_ Her torch focused on the ground and her feet moving carefully so as not to fall off the cliff, she reached the edge of the little plateau and shined the beam down at the bridge. A fortuitous flash of lightning lit up the sea and revealed a dark hole half-submerged on the edge of the island.

If she could not find any secrets within the castle, she had no option but to explore Merlin's Cave. It was not as if she were not already soaked to the bone. What harm could a little more water do?

The beam of the torch played along the edge until she found the stairs again, and she started the climb down. It was only a hundred or so steps. As long as she was careful, she would be fine.

Her left foot hit the edge of one of the steps, and it crumbled just enough for her trainer to slip off.

Hazel's eyes went wide as she felt herself start to fall.

Hard, unforgiving stone slammed into her legs. Her chest. Her head. She spun as she fell, opening more targets for the stone stairs to bash and break. Something sharp stabbed through her leg and ripped a harsh gasp from her mouth. Halfway down, her hand finally caught a stair and turned her tumbling fall into a slide that ended another five steps down.

The end of the fall made the pain in her leg burn even hotter, so strong that tears were pouring down her cheeks and mingling with the rain. She looked down through her right eye, the only side that still had her glasses intact, and a wave of nausea swept through her when she saw how her leg was twisted the wrong way around below her knee. Something white and slicked with red had punched through the skin, and darkness creeped into the edges of her vision and threatened to make her pass out before she blinked and looked away.

There was no way she was walking on that. She was trapped here, in the middle of a storm with a broken leg.

The snap of bone she heard during her fall was familiar, and swallowing down the urge to throw up all over herself she reached down with both hands to hover just above the leg bone sticking through her skin. It was just like when she broke the sapling. She healed that. She could heal this. She could!

Scrunching her face, she tried to imagine the green lighting bursting forth from her hands to course over her injuries and seal them shut. She tried to imagine the pain shooting up from her leg all the way to her belly stopping. She tried to imagine being able to walk again.

Her hands shook, and water dripped from them, but aside from a few glimmers of light around the edges of the wound was nothing. There was too much pain, too much to distract her and steal away her focus.

Several minutes passed, and she looked up to a sky that was completely covered with clouds. Great sobs escaped her, but she could not stop them any more than she could stop her tears or the pain. The storm still rumbled, the thunder growing louder if anything, and she let loose a silent

scream of anger and pain at the heavens. A tiny growl eventually escaped at the very end, the air from her lungs passing through a tightening throat even if her vocal cords were useless.

It was the storm's fault she was like this! Why she was hurting and could not walk! She already could not speak, and now she was further crippled?! It wasn't fair! Her hands grabbed her ruined leg, her anger spiking further while the flashes in the clouds above came faster and faster. She did not want much! She just wanted her leg fixed!

A sharp _crack_ shredded the air and made her ears ring, lightning striking scarily close and the thunder that followed nearly shoving her to the side into the rocky cliff. The storm unleashing the power she had already felt, clearly not pleased at being yelled at.

And in time with a second crack, emerald lightning erupted from her hands at last.

Perhaps it was the nature of her power. Perhaps it was how her spell seemed to be affected by the storm raging around her. Whatever it was, her healing was anything but gentle. A _slurp_ came as the bone was all but yanked back under the skin. Her shin spun with as much violent force as had been used to break it in the first place. Pins and needles raced down her leg from knee to the tips of her toes and then bounced back harsher and faster all the way to her hip and lower back, another wave of nausea roiling in her stomach.

Gasping and grabbing still at her leg, Hazel stared down at where the break had been and was no longer. She bent and straightened her knee, then rolled her ankle around and around. Everything felt… fine. As if it had never been hurt in the first place.

Her glasses were still broken, so she reached up and found that the frame itself was still intact, if admittedly twisted on her head. It was the left lens that was ruined. Pulling the glasses off her head, she held them in her hand and forced the lightning out again. The plastic reformed, and the glass or plastic or whatever it was in the lens felt like it was regrowing from nothing until her glasses were once more restored to their former self. It was noticeably harder to do this than when she fixed them in Shervage Wood, and that worried her. Was there a limit to the number of times she could fix something? Or maybe it was just that healing her leg had used up too much of her magic power and she was running on empty.

That had its own worrisome implications.

The thunder started to soften, but the rain was still coming down in buckets, and understandably she had less than no intention of walking down the stairs after this experience. She pushed herself onto her feet and grasped the straps of her backpack. There was enough worry in her gut that she was dearly tempted to hold onto the rock wall, but she forced that away long enough to hop in place—

—and land on the island side of the bridge.

The sudden appearance created a splash in the air as she suddenly took up the same space as the drops of rain, and she did her best to shake off the extra water. For all the good it did, anyway. Now she was not in as much danger of being electrocuted by sudden blasts of lightning, but in return she was back in range of the waves.

Her gaze found the entrance of the cave, and she bit her lip. The entire reason she came back down so soon was because she wanted to get a look at a cave affiliated with Merlin, the greatest wizard she had ever heard of. That was before she broke her leg, though. Was she willing to risk another injury like that so soon?

Another wave hit the shore of the island with a violent crash, and she imagined herself being thrown into the cliff with that much force.

_Nope. Not doing that_. She gave the cave a sad look and a small wave. The shiver that raced down her spine added further weight to her decision. _Sorry, Merlin. I'll come back to take a look at you later, maybe. But not tonight_.

* * *

**Some of this chapter was written in an emergency room lobby. I'll let you guess which part.**

**Silently Watches out.**


	7. The Circus

**Glrasshopper:** I haven't gone into extensive detail in-story because Hazel herself doesn't know much beyond "I can't talk, and it's because of this scar on my neck I got the same time my parents died". What I will reveal is that her vocal cords are ruined, to the point she can't make any vocalizations whatsoever. (Even when whispering, you still need your cords closed to create air turbulence. She can't even do that.) An electrolarynx would have helped that, but do you really think the Dursleys would buy her something that expensive?

**RedShirt1453:** My overall plan is for Hazel to learn or recreate a few different skills that never showed up in the books. As for the Wizarding World, they mostly have forgotten these places for a number of reason. First, blame Binns. When you have not one, not two, but _several_ generations of Hogwarts students who never got a good grasp of history, that causes lots of issues. Hogwarts isn't the only school of magic in Britain, but it is the best and the one other schools base themselves on. Second, wizards who ARE in the know don't want to talk about other magical traditions on the island. Part of that is a superiority complex and not wanting to admit they needed help for stuff like taking down the Gurt Wurm, and part of that is guilt about something else they did (which WILL come up in-story). Third, at least with regards to "places of power", using an external source of magic isn't something that wizards by and large do. That was more a druidic tradition.

**jh831:** Hazel's jumping works the same as Apparation, namely that she has to have an idea where she's going to get there. It was too dark to see anything besides the very entrance to the cave, which still puts her at risk of being slammed into the rocky shore by the waves. She also wouldn't be able to keep people out of the cave. Merlin's Cave at Tintagel is an actual seaside cave you can visit and walk into, so somebody would notice.

**Winlyn:** Keep in mind that Hazel is only nine years old. The epitome of grace she is _not_. XD

**"Where's the bird?":** Morgan was smart and stayed out of the rain. Also, I keep falling into the same trap as I did with Loki and JKR did with Hedwig, namely not mentioning them except when they play a direct role in the story.

* * *

**Chapter 7  
****The Circus**

Raindrops pelted Hazel's head, and she took a moment to look up at the sky and glare. After two days at Tintagel waiting for the rains to stop, she had left the island and the cave that still taunted her with the mysteries she was sure were hiding within. The rain and the cold ocean waters together were enough of a deterrent that she planned to put off swimming into the cave until sometime in the summer, when it was not freezing cold.

And then the blasted rain followed her as she walked back east.

Her thoroughly filthy trainers squelched through the mud, and she looked up the slope of the hill towards the stone tower that sat at the top. She had actually been excited to visit Glastonbury Tor, but the pictures she had seen in various books were all taken during the day. It was much less impressive seen behind all the rain coming down. She hoped the tall St. Michael's tower would provide some little respite. On the plus side, the rain meant that fewer people were here than she expected would be here on a normal day, currently just a smattering of umbrellas huddled around the tower.

Glastonbury Tor was the site of several myths of different types, and she was eager to discover which one was true. She had read that it was connected to the Isle of Avalon, the island where the dying King Arthur was brought to be buried. Another book had said it was the place where the Holy Grail was kept, the sacred cup that would give eternal youth. Yet _more_ books talked about it being an entrance to Annwn, one of the Otherworlds of the Celts and ruled by a fairy king named either Gwyn ap Nudd or Arawn. Or maybe it was a portal to the realm of the dead. There was no telling which story was true, and she knew even less which one she wanted to be true.

If she were honest with herself, she would admit that finding a doorway to the land of the dead would be… worthwhile. To be able to find her mother and ask questions, just to be able to _see_ her? Hazel knew that was surely not going to be the case, but part of her could not help but hold out the tiniest sliver of hope.

Her hopes for getting dry were dashed into nothingness when she arrived at the tower itself. The walls were intact, of course, but the same could not be said about the roof. It was not as if it had recently be damaged, either; where the tops of the walls ended was just a square hole. The stones that made up the floor were slick and smooth from years and years of water pounding them, and remembering her relatively recent experience in the ruins of Tintagel she carefully watched her step while walking around the interior.

One corner of the building was drier than the others, sheltered beneath a low overhang that had almost crumbled away through the centuries, and she huddled underneath it. Morgan, apparently noticing that it was not as wet as it had been, sidestepped out of the crook of her neck where he had done his best to avoid the rain. A flutter of wings and feather sprayed what rainwater had accumulated on him all over the place, and he turned his puffed up head towards her and gave her a birdy glare.

_It's not my fault everything's wet_, she scolded him. He had settled himself into a tree when she was trying to explore Tintagel, but there were no trees close to the hill of the Tor. Her pet was okay waiting a short distance away, but when she had suggested he wait in a dry bush just over a kilometer away his response had been to peck the lobe of her ear and squeeze closer as if he were trying to slip beneath her skin. _Besides, you're a bird. You should be used to getting wet. I doubt your flock only flew around when it was clear and sunny._

He ignored that entirely and settled back down. Hazel, on the other hand, looked around with a grimace. It seemed that the few people who had made the trek up here were already leaving, and if she had any money worth betting she would guess it was because the rain was only getting heavier as the day wore on. The sky was not getting any less grey, that was for sure.

For all her chiding, she would not mind getting dry either. As it was, she was going to be stuck in wet clothes for the rest of the day. Wet and dirty clothes, she reminded herself with a look at everything from her knees down. A grass and dirt hill was fine for walking when it was not being turned into a pile of mud.

Plus, she was getting tired of having to wash her clothes in sinks. She knew that proper washing machines used special soap to clean clothes, but that also was just one more thing to keep in the limited space in her backpack. She had tried a few times to imagine a washing machine, even an iron, to clean her things, but the mental picture never took. She supposed it was because unlike a hand or a key, both of which were simple to picture or feel, she had no idea how either machine worked. Or maybe her mental tools just could not be machines and had to be simple. She could not know for sure, not when she was still making this all up as she went.

Pools of water had formed on the floor, and she watched as raindrops fell into them and sent ripples spreading out over the surface and crashing into each other. She was a little tempted to wash her shoes off right here and now; the motions just make it look so clean, even if she knew the water was dirty from hundreds and thousands of dirty feet walking all over it. It was just so unfair—

Her thoughts stopped in their tracks, and she watched the ripples more intently. It _did_ look clean. Just seeing it, her mind went to getting clean, washing dirt and grime off everything and leaving it pristine.

Not _all_ her tools were copies of real things. Doctors did not use lighting to heal people. Being covered in smoke did not make people unnoticeable. They were pictures in her head to give her magic something to focus on. If lightning and smoke worked, why not rippling water?

_You might want to settle in_, she told Morgan. _This is going to take a while._

Hazel was happier than ever that this corner of the tower was more or less dry. She slid down the wall onto the ground, the rear end of her jeans becoming damp from the water that was there. Still, it was not so bad that she could not close her eyes and try to focus. If anything it helped get her started.

_First things first. Water is wet._ As obvious a statement as it was, that was to be the basis of her newest spell, assuming she could get it to work. Hazel thought of the wet on her pants, then about how it felt when her hands were fresh from the sink. _Water washes away dirt_. She remembered how her hands felt when she finished working in the garden for the Dursleys only to stick them under the faucet and let the water wipe the dirt away. She added soap to her framework, thinking about how it felt slick in her hands and the almost nothing weight of the bubbles that accumulated when she washed her clothes. _Then the water dries._ Clothes straight from the sink, still dripping wet, went from being heavy to dry and returning to their normal weight.

That was what she wanted. Not just to get things wet. If that was all she was capable of, she might as well keep sneaking into buildings to wash her clothes in the sink. She still did not know how many spells she could learn to cast before she had to rely on special items to help her out like so many wizards and witches in books did. She was not going to waste what might be a limited resource on something that was not useful.

Taking those feelings she had, the memories she had called up, she stared at her trainers, the white toes and sides invisible under days of caked on dirt, and the brown smears covering most of her lower legs. _I want them __**clean**_.

Something shifted at the edge of her jeans, barely peeking from the other side of her leg. Another mental push, and ripples of pale blue swept over the dirt and mud. Slowly at first, but quickly getting faster, they bounced back and forth and off each other, just like the ripples in the pool had done. Where they moved, the layers of brown lightened, and they kept going and going and going until every speck of dirt was gone.

_I did it. Morgan, I did it!_ She scrambled to her feet and jumped in joy – her spell _worked_! – and slammed the top of her head against the stone shelf that was providing protection from the rain. Her butt hit the ground again as she covered her aching head with her hands. _Ouch!_

Morgan, who had jumped off her shoulder at the sudden movement, twittered at her in a manner that sounded suspiciously like laughter.

Still, she had succeeded! Never again would she have to hide somewhere just to get clean or scare nice old men because she looked like something that crawled out of the dumpster. _You can quit laughing now_, she told her bird with a frown when she realized he was still chirping at her. _Besides, we haven't figured out what this place really __**was**__. There has to be something here. It wouldn't have as many stories about it if there weren't_.

…Then again, there was story after story about Stonehenge, and she had found absolutely nothing there. This _could_ be the same way. She hoped not, but she could not rule it out.

Shoving those thoughts from her head, Hazel settled back down in a cross-legged position and closed her eyes. She knew from her experiments in Wistman's Wood that reaching 'roots' into the ground had connected her to the forest. Could she do the same thing with the hill? It was worth a try.

She had to adjust herself a few times before she managed to ignore the wet, but eventually she managed to get herself in the right frame of mind. Almost immediately her eyes popped open again. There _was_ something here. She could not describe just what it was, even to herself; the closest she could manage was that there was an _itch_ on the inside of her skull coming from one side. It had pulsed and throbbed in her mind as soon as she reached into the ground. No subtlety or welcoming like the Woods had offered her, either. This was right there, standing apart from everything else.

Hazel picked herself off the ground, avoiding the shelf this time around, and waited for Morgan to flap back to her shoulder before she left the tower. This itch was on the steep side.

Glastonbury Tor was not the tower at the top of the hill. It was the entire hill, a strange structure of seven steps or terraces that had smoothed out and been covered by thick green grass. The hill itself had two sides. One, the side she had climbed to get here, was longer with a gentler slope. That was the side most everybody climbed. The side opposite was steeper, the terraces nearly merging into each other. That was where her feet and her feeling carried her. She could not tell just where it was outside the tower, and even looking back and trying to compare where she had felt it coming from while she was sitting down was ineffective.

Scuffing the ground, she sighed. It was a good thing she had figured out now how to clean her clothes. She was going to need it.

Three times she had to sit down in the rain and mud in order to feel out where the itch was located, each time moving closer to the source. Finally she stood on the middle terrace and looked at the side of the hill. Her last brief meditation told her it was supposed to be right here, but no matter how hard she looked, she could not find anything. Was it _inside_ the hill, not on the surface?

Morgan chirped in her ear, and she shrugged. She had no idea what she was doing. But since she was already here and already dirty, there was no reason not to do something silly just in case whatever she was looking for was here but hidden from her sight. Closing her eyes, she pressed the tips of her fingers into the side of the hill and slowly walked her way towards the itch.

The dirt vanished beneath her fingers, and she almost fell into the nothingness in front of her before she caught herself. Her eyes opened up to reveal she had taken that one all-important step from the outside into a stone stairwell of all things. The meager sunlight piercing through the clouds was just enough to illuminate the first few steps, but beyond that there was nothing but darkness. Nudging Morgan from her shoulder to her opposite hand, she slipped the backpack off and pulled out her electric torch.

Her feet followed the stairs, twisting to the right and then to the left and back to the right in a serpentine pattern that quickly left the light of day far behind. It took five minutes or so to reach the end of the stairs, and her eyes widened as she stood on the last step and stared into the chamber beyond. The room had been a perfect sphere, smooth as anything she had ever seen, but that was before it was carved into. Lines crisscrossed along the surface, not random scratches but obviously intentional. The lines merged into triangle and squares and intersected with circles containing alien symbols, a diagram that would have been complicated enough drawn on a sheet of paper but made even worse covering a three-dimensional shape and overlapping with a second and a third and likely a fourth. It was a dizzying pattern she could not understand but was clearly meant to do _something_.

Something glinted to the side when she swept her torchlight around the chamber, and she brought it back to take a look. A metal plaque was pressed into the wall of the tunnel. The words were unreadable, some of the letters not even in the alphabet, but after a moment's staring the plaque became blurry and a little bit painful to her eyes. She blinked, and when she looked at it again the words had changed into something recognizable.

WITH THREEFOLD RITUAL  
SEALED BY SALT AND BLOOD AND IRON  
THE ROAD TO THE GREENWILD BANISHED AND BARRED  
MAY THE GREAT FAE ROT IN THEIR GLORIOUS HALLS  
NOT TO STEP UPON THE LANDS OF MEN FOREVERMORE

Hazel could only stare for a minute. Two. Eventually her brain caught up with her eyes, and she started breathing fast and heavy. The fae were real? The _fae_ were _REAL_?! Every story she had ever read about the Irish fae depicted them as immensely powerful, stronger than she had ever believed any human could ever match. They were absolutely terrifying.

Her gaze and her light flickered along the pattern again. The fae were no joke, creatures with morality utterly unlike humanity and with the sheer magical strength to go with it. And somebody had just… shut down the portal from their world to this one? Closed and locked it as simply as if it had been a door?

This room and everything in it was the work of someone way smarter than her, standing so far above her own abilities that she could not find the starting point to get from here to there. Even if she assumed this was the utmost limit of what magic was capable of – human magic, anyway – she had a long, _long_ way to go.

_I guess it's a good thing I have something to aspire to?_, she told Morgan, the sound of even her own inner voice wavering in disbelief and just a hint of mortal terror. If this spell, ritual, whatever it was ever collapsed, she somehow doubted the things that came out would be in a pleasant mood. _But right now I just want to get out of here before I touch something I'm not supposed to._

* * *

Hazel skipped out of the Tesco the following day, her backpack full of food and her clothes brighter than they had ever been since she pulled them off the racks back in Greater Whinging. She had not realized before now just how poor a job she had been doing washing her clothes, but clearly she had been overlooking some spots. There was not a speck of dirt or mud anywhere on any of her clothes now.

A small, thoughtful frown crossed her face. _I wonder where all the dirt went_, she admitted to Morgan. _It wasn't on the ground, so it didn't fall off, and it didn't make a big cloud of dust either. Making it all just vanish, poof gone, isn't the strangest thing I've ever done, I guess, but it's still curious_.

Shaking that thought away, she kept walking down the street. It was not as if she was going to get any answers standing around.

As she walked, her ears picked up something other than the normal noise of a town. There seemed to be music of all things coming from several blocks over. _A concert or something? But it's the middle of the day_. She looked over at Morgan, who simply looked back at her. No help from that quarter, it seemed.

She was pretty much done with Glastonbury, she told herself. The Tor was the only reason she was here. There was nothing keeping her from taking a peek at whatever was going on before she headed north.

The music got louder and clearer the closer she came, and she scratched concert off the list of possibilities. The tune was too happy, not to mention it repeated itself very quickly. There were no words, either. The people there seemed to be having fun nonetheless, as the closer she came the better she could hear their cheers and laughter. She stepped around a corner and stopped in her tracks as she saw what she had been hearing, her eyes wide and a smile growing on her face.

This was a fair!

Her eyes greedily ate up the colorful rides swinging through the air, and her nose was picking up the smells of popcorn and all the treats for sale. She had never been to a fair before. Her aunt and uncle had been happy to take Dudley to them any time one passed through Little Whinging, but her they locked in her cupboard while they were out. A few times Uncle Vernon had thought about bringing her along to leave her there, something about how 'her kind' would be right at home with the 'carnies', but nothing ever came from it. The dark figure that lingered in their minds whenever they thought about doing something too bad to her was deterrent enough to keep her around.

But now? Now she was on her own, and that meant no Dursleys telling her she couldn't see what was so special about the fair.

Getting in was easy. She just had to wait until a family stepped up to the gate leading into the fairgrounds, and she slipped in behind them under her veil of unremarkableness. She did not want to risk the boy at the gate taking in the admittance fees paying extra attention to her if she tried to go in by herself. Her smoke had so far been successful in getting people to ignore her, but she knew she was not really invisible. Not bringing attention to herself seemed like it was the best way to help her spell along.

Once she was within the crowds, however, she split off and let her smoke fall away. With freshly cleaned clothes and among a bunch of other kids, no one was going to pay much attention to her anyway. She was just a girl and her bird, nothing to see here. Her gaze darted this way and that, taking in everything. There were rides to ride, snacks to eat, and performances to watch. So much to do, and only today to do it!

A stall selling candy floss was close to the entrance, and despite the cheery smile on his face she could hear the frustrated muttering in his head whenever he saw people pass by the stall without buying his treats, few though they were. While he was distracted with all the people lined up to pay, Hazel curled the fingers on her right hand one at a time and opened them all at once. Her mage hand appeared next to the cone of floss farthest away from the man and the crowds, and with a quiet breath she lifted the cone _just_ enough to get it out of the plastic holder and lowered it to the ground.

A quick look around did not find anyone staring at her or the cone. No one had noticed a thing.

Rather than walk right by the front where the man could see her, she floated the floss closer to the back of the cart and walked nearer before jerking her right hand towards her. The motion shot the cone into her left hand, and she let her spell disperse. Her eyes almost bulged out of her head when she took the first bite. It was so sweet! She had never had anything like this, and by the second bite she was wiping her tongue around in her mouth and looking for something to drink to cut through the sticky sugar feeling.

The rides were the next thing that called to her, and she tried a few before making the mistake of climbing into a spinning bowl ride. By the time the minute or so the ride ran came to an end, she was staggering around and trying to hold down the candy floss and water in her stomach. _No more rides for me_, she said to Morgan when he fluttered back down to her shoulder. He had been smart enough to avoid that one, and now she regretted not following suit.

After a few moments, her feet felt steady enough to walk away and look for something not quite so nauseating to do next. A sign next to a darkened cart caught her eye, and she approached closer to stare at the hand with the eye in the palm. _Madam Enigma's Psychic Readings_, the words above the hand proclaimed, and below it continued, _Learn what Fate has in store for you!_

_What do you think?_, she asked her companion. _Do you think it'll be worth it?_

Morgan did not answer, his head twitching around and looking at all the sources of noise.

_You're no help at all_. She looked back at the sign and shrugged her shoulders. The Dursleys had been of the firm belief that fortune telling was a bunch of nonsense. That was reason enough to give it a chance as far as she was concerned.

The inside of the cart was filled with smoke, and she coughed at the strange almost-herby scent. A single woman with stringy brown hair held back by a bright blue headband sat on the other side of a table that was covered by a tie-dyed cloth, her brown dress fitting more with the overall darkness than the patches of loud color. She was also younger than Hazel expected for someone called 'Madam', maybe in her late twenties at most. Madam Enigma blinked her eyes a few times before her gaze finally focused on Hazel. "Well, well," she said in a slightly hoarse voice. "Hello, little girl. You enter the realm of mysticism and divination. _And interrupted my me time_," she added in a voice that did not sound at all like the one she spoke with. "_Oh well, duty calls_. Do you have a question, little one? A question that burns in your heart and soul?"

Hazel frowned and thought for a moment. She had many, many questions, but whether they were ones a fortune teller could answer? She finally shrugged again and nodded.

"_A girl of few words, this one_. Good. Sit, sit," Madam Enigma said, waving at the chair on Hazel's side of the table. "What question can I answer for you?"

Pulling out her pad and one of her pens, Hazel thought for a moment before writing something down and turning the pad so Madam Enigma could see it. _"I need guidance on where to go next."_

Madam Enigma looked between the pad and Hazel several times, her previously placid face now showing a little bit of concern. "_Mute? How unfortunate. That can't be easy. And it takes anything interactive like the crystal ball off the table. I guess I could do some palmistry, but…_" She turned around and rummaged in a short cabinet behind her before coming back with a thick deck of long cards. "For life in general, I have always felt the Tarot to have the clearest answers. _Bob said we needed to raise the price for some of my readings, but for this girl_ it will be five pounds, and then we shall discover what the fates have in store for you, my dear."

A discount? She nibbled on her lip for a moment before reaching back into her backpack and straightening back up with a five pound note in her hand. She would not say no to that offer.

Once the note was secreted away, Madam Enigma started shuffling the deck with quick, practiced motions. "I want you to think about what you want. What you really, really want. Think about what you've done to try achieving that goal. Concentrate on it. _It's a lot more useful than 'opening your inner eye'._"

Hazel blinked in surprise at that. That last bit had sounded completely different than either the woman's voice or thoughts, instead being a high, wavering voice. It was almost as if she was quoting somebody. Her teacher, maybe?

How was it that people could find teachers for _fortune telling_, but she could not find one for magic? The world was so unfair sometimes.

The shuffling came to an end, and Madam Enigma drew the first card and laid it down. Hazel could only stare at the picture of a man lying facedown on the ground, a number of swords stabbed into his back. She had no idea that Tarot cards were so violent.

"_Oh my. That is an inauspicious start._ This card symbolizes your self, who you are at your core. It changes just as you do," Madam Enigma said, keeping the surprise in her thoughts out of her tone. "The Ten of Swords represents loss and painful endings. Betrayal, even. You've lost someone close to you already, haven't you?" she added in her real voice.

Hazel could only nod. _"My parents,"_ she wrote.

"I'm sorry for your loss." Hazel nodded again, and Madam Enigma pulled the next card and laid it crosswise on top of of the first. She had to turn her head to see another man looking at a bush in the corner that was decorated with stars. "Here we see the problem facing you. The Seven of Pentacles reversed. You said you want to know where to go from here, but it is hard to see the path when you do not have any long-term goal."

The next card was above the other two. A hand coming from a cloud and holding a green stick. "The Ace of Wands. Your focus is the search for inspiration and growth."

She nodded. That sounded about right. Sadly, so did the comment about not having any long term plans. It was hard to have those when she knew so little.

The fourth card went below the crossed cards. "This card represents your subconscious. It is what is pushing you from behind, even if you don't know it…" Madam Enigma trailed off and looked a little harder at the man on the card who had turned his back on a stack of glasses. "The Eight of Cups. What drives you is a need for escape. You are not running _towards_ anything. You're running _away_ from something. _This is not a happy spread._"

Hazel picked up her pad to try arguing that, but before her pen touched the paper she hesitated and put it back down. That was right, as much as she did not want to admit it. She _was_ trying to escape what her life was like in Little Whinging. She did not want a dreary life devoid of magic. She did not want to be stuck around people who thought her creepy and weird. Even sitting here listening to her fortune was because it was not something the Dursleys believed in.

Madam Enigma cleared her throat. "Let us look now at your past. Perhaps it will clear up what you are running from." This card went to the left of the crossed pair. A woman standing surrounded by more swords, a blindfold over her eyes. "The Eight of Swords?" Madam Enigma said in a voice less confident that she had been using. Her eyes flicked over at Hazel. "You felt confined, trapped. _Imprisoned_. That is why you are running so far and so fast even thought you don't know where to go. You need to spread your wings because you could never fly before now."

She could only grimace. That was way more true than she thought these cards could figure out. Maybe fortune telling was _not_ a bunch of rubbish after all.

"I know it can be hard hearing things about yourself that you wish to ignore, but it is only through understand where we are starting from it makes sense where we are going. But the hard part is over," she said in a forced cheerful voice, pulling one more card from the top of the deck. "This card will show your future and what is waiting for you. _Please be something good, for her sake_. The—"

Madam Enigma stopped with a slight choking sound, her eyes glued to the last card. Hazel was not sure what was so special about it. It was more detailed than the others, showing a tall pillar against a dark sky. Lightning was striking the top, and it looked like someone had fallen or jumped off to get away from the bolt.

"The Tower," Madam Enigma finally said in a strangled voice, but her eyes were not on the card. They were on Hazel. "_What the hell is wrong with this girl that she has the __**Tower**__ as her future?!_ Change is coming, my dear. Something unlike anything you've ever known before. _Yeah, change all right. Violent, chaotic, destructive change. I wouldn't wish this card on my worst enemy._ But only you can make that change worth the cost."

Somehow, Hazel had the suspicion that this 'cost' was way more than Madam Enigma was implying it would be.

"_Thank you,"_ she wrote before putting the pad back into her bag. On that note, she had lost her taste for the fair. She needed to get moving through Gloucestershire to reach her next destination.

She stood up, but right as she turned around Madam Enigma spoke again. "Little girl?" She turned around to find the woman worrying her lip. It took her a minute to figure out what to say, but finally she said in a soft voice, "Be careful."

Hazel gave her a nod. Even before this, she had planned to be careful. After the reading? Absolutely.

* * *

**I get to have entirely too much fun with this story. Seriously. Thankfully it also gives me a chance to pull stuff from my old notes for Deal with a Devil. The fae being sealed away was intended to be a major plot point in 4th year of that story.**

**Silently Watches out.**


	8. The Field

**lederware:** Hazel is walking from place to place. It feels weird to any of us from the States to imagine that, but you have to remember that England (the UK in general, but Hazel hasn't left England proper) is relatively small. To walk from Tintagel to Glastonbury, for instance, only takes 36 hours. Even if we assume that she's walking at a fraction of that assumed speed because she's a little kid, it would take her about a week, and there are enough towns and villages in between that she can sleep in a building rather than camping out in the woods or fields.

**Tigers-Telling-Tales:** How much research did I have to do? So far, I believe still less than ten hours. Part of that was research on runaway youth as well. It helps that Stonehenge, Tintagel/Merlin's Cave, and Glastonbury Tor are places I already knew about, which means I didn't have to spend too much time on them. It's the other… four places?… that I needed to do reading on, plus a few more that I initially considered and threw out.

"**Was the fortune teller quoting Trelawney?":** Maybe. Or maybe not. It depends on if you think I would have Hazel talk to a Muggleborn witch and then leave without realizing here was somebody who could answer _so many_ of her questions.

And relatedly…

**"Shouldn't have Hazel asked Madam Enigma about magic in general?":** Keep in mind the assumptions Hazel has made. She thinks magic has all but died out. Fortune tellers are people even the Dursleys know about. Ergo, fortune tellers aren't the same as the witches and druids she is searching for.

"**Are the fae going to play a role in the story?":** I honestly don't know. I only have definite plans through July 1991, and after that I still have plenty of room for inspiration to strike. That's why I deliberately leave plot hooks like this lying around. Maybe the fae will come into play. Maybe it's just a shocking discovery. Only time and my muse will tell.

* * *

**Chapter 8  
****The Field**

The soft creak of a squeaky hinge drifted through the room. The sound, quiet as it was, was still enough for Hazel's eyes to pop open. By the time the man in the yellow apron had stepped fully into the room, she was surrounded by grey smoke and watching him rummage through boxes of pots and pans and blankets. Only once he grabbed whatever he was looking for and closed the door again behind him did she let the spell fall.

She had never been the deepest sleeper, not living in the cupboard under the stairs as she had, but living on her own and wandering from place to place had only sharpened her sleeping ears. Waking up to any nearby sound meant she would never be caught when she was at her most vulnerable. The last thing she needed was for a well-meaning meddler to stumble upon her and start making arrangements that she had nothing to do with.

This was not the first time she had woken up when somebody decided to do something in her sleeping space without knowing she was there, and she was sure it would not be the last.

With a sigh, she picked herself up from the corner she had chosen early in the morning as her place of rest and peered out through the window. The sun was sinking fast, which meant it was time to move on. Upper Milton was the last town for a while, because next she had to make her way through the Mendip Hills. She had been tempted to wait until the daylight to start her trek, if only because she had never been to a national Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty before, but that was also the reason she decided to stick to her nighttime schedule. It was far easier to avoid anyone who might ask awkward questions when there was no one else awake and walking around.

She quickly changed her clothes, but unlike before Glastonbury she did not shove her dirty clothes into the backpack. Now she could send waves of blue magic running over them to get rid of every speck of dirt before they took their places next to clothes that were similarly clean with a wide smile on her face. Of all the spells she knew, this was rapidly becoming one of her favorites. It was not as incredible as her jumping or her healing, but it was just so very useful in her day to day life.

Casting her eyes around, it was relatively easy to find the puffball that was her friend sitting on one of the metal shelves a few feet away. _Come on, Morgan. Wake up._ The feathers ruffled slightly at the sound of her mental voice, and after several seconds her bird pulled his head out from under his wing. He blinked at her a few times before tucking his head back out of sight.

_Morgan,_ she told him more sternly this time, one hand propped on her hip. _Let's go. We have to get moving._

His head came into view again, and he blinked blearily at her. It was clear what he would be telling her if she could speak bird.

_Yes, I know it's night and you're a daytime bird. Once we get to Bristol, we can do daylight traveling, but not while we'd be noticeable._ He only looked at her for a moment, and she sighed. _I promise we'll go back to doing daylight stuff, okay? Promise. We just need to get there first._

With a low warble, Morgan shook out his wings and fluttered over to her shoulder. He might very well fall asleep on her while they were walking, but that was fine. She did not need him to be awake so much as she did not want to risk leaving him behind.

She did not have to walk through the store to get out, for which she was thankful. She instead left via the same access door that she had used to get inside as the sun was coming up. A map of western England was in one of the pockets of her backpack, and she pulled out it and the compass she had 'borrowed' from the same store. Turning herself to face north, she checked the map and started walking in that direction but just a little to the right.

Bristol was not her ultimate destination – there was still plenty left to see throughout England, and that was not even counting the sights she was sure existed in Wales and Scotland – but it was a reasonable place to stop and do some more research about what was still waiting for her and start planning her next steps. It would also be the largest city she had ever set foot in. Half a million people? She would have no problem at all vanishing in that.

Rather than walk on the road itself, she followed along not even a dozen feet to the side. There were a few trees scattered around, but even without them it would be easier to hide from any approaching cars if she did not have to get off the road first. Not that she really had to worry about that happening once the sun had fully disappeared and she was reliant on her electric torch for light. That she was fine with. From what she could find and checking with her map, she should be able to get from Upper Milton to one of the towns on the edge of Bristol over the course of tonight, and from there she could go to Bristol proper tomorrow.

The crescent moon rose higher in the sky as the hours passed. Hazel rubbed her eyes for a moment, and when she dropped her hand something caught her attention from the edge of her vision. She squinted at it once she was fully looking at it, but even then she was unsure of what she was looking at. The closest thing she could think of was a little campfire, flickering in the night, but it was not the normal yellow and orange she was used to. It was a bright pale blue of all things. It was not natural.

Might it be _magical_?!

Without a moment's hesitation she left the side of the road and walked towards the field. The fire could not be that far away, maybe a couple hundred feet. That would not take long to cross, and when she got there, maybe she would get some answers.

The closer she walked to the fire, the more obvious it was that something was off. The fire was growing larger in her view, but not as much as she would have expected. It was almost as if it were moving away, though not as quickly as she was moving towards it. Picking up her pace, she started jogging and then running. She had to get there before whoever's campfire it was vanished. It might be her only chance to talk to somebody else who was like her!

Now that she was running, she was actually making progress, so of course it would be at that moment that the fire winked out of existence. _No!_, she screamed, her eyes still focused on the last spot where she saw it. This could not be happening. Not when she was so close to answers!

Her torchlight fanned this way and that, and finally it landed on something. Hazel knelt to take a look at it and frowned in confusion. This was not a campfire. It was a single thick stick, and while one end was thicker and wrapped in half-burnt cloth, it would not explain the size of the fire she saw. Nor would anyone carry a burning torch close to the ground like what she saw. Old fashioned torches like that were meant to be held up in the air—

Something hard and heavy smashed into the back of her head, and all she could see were stars.

Falling to the ground, she heard Morgan twittering in anger, and she blinked quickly to try to get her vision to clear. When it did, she almost wished she had stayed blind. The creature that had hit her now loomed above her as best as its short stature allowed. Its wrinkly face split into a smile that revealed yellowing triangular teeth that sat below a long, crooked nose and glowing eyes the same blue as the flames that lured her out here. Its dirty fingernails, what few were visible, were long and curved like claws. One hand was wrapped around a thick wooden club, and the other came into sight from behind its back along with a shimmering green knife. It giggled and jabbered something in a language that was most definitely not English, the slight movements of its head shifting a long hat that reached almost to its feet and was the same brownish red color as rust.

Or long-dried blood.

_It's a red cap,_ she thought in quickly mounting terror. _It's a __**red cap**__!_

The murderous fae raised its knife higher, the direction of its gaze at her chest telling her just where it planned to plunge the sharp blade, when a ball of yellow and blue flew screeching into its face. The red cap yelled something undoubtedly cruel at Morgan and waved its club to ward him off, and that was the opportunity she needed. Pulling her legs to her chest, she kicked out and slammed both feet into its stomach. The force was enough to double it over, but where she had hoped to knock it to the ground all it did was take a couple of small steps backwards. She pushed herself to her feet, only one thought on her mind. She had to get far, far away from this thing, and now.

As fast as her scrambling was, the red cap was faster. She was not even fully upright when the red cap leapt into the air and brought its club down, this time right into her face. The blow itself, heavier than the red cap's size would have suggested, drove her to the ground, and then searing pain erupted around her nose and her left eye. An instant later that eye started stinging as something hot and wet dribbled into it.

Squeezing that eye shut, she turned her head to keep her right eye on the fae that was again advancing on her, its earlier smile gone and a snarl in its place instead. Hazel pushed herself backwards with both arms with all the haste she could muster, her torch lying on the ground where she had dropped it when the little monster clubbed her in the face. The more she crab-walked away, the less of the torch she could see, and without that light the less of the world she could see.

If she was hoping to hide in the shadows, she was going to be disappointed. The red cap kept stride, not chasing her down but not losing any ground either. It was toying with her, waiting for her to tire herself out or just until it grew bored. Then it would kill her and, she assumed, eat her.

Morgan swooped in to her defense once again, but the red cap batted him away with little difficulty now that it knew he was there. Her one good eye flicked from the red cap to the line of grass lit up by the beam from the torch. She needed to get out of here, but it was not going to let her stand up and run away.

She _did_ have another option, but she had never tried doing it when she was almost laying on the ground like this. It might very well simply not be possible.

But did she have anything at all to lose right now?

Her right eye focused on the red cap again, who had apparently noticed that she had something in mind. She could no longer see its expression, but she could see its head tilting. She could see its left hand raising the knife again. Had it grown bored already? Did it intend to keep her from trying whatever plan it could see her brewing?

Baring her teeth at it, the closest she could get to a grin, she shoved herself backwards again—

—and landed on the grass behind her torch. Snatching it up, she screamed in her mind, _Morgan!_

The red cap spun around looking for her, and she pushed herself to her knees at the same time its eyes fell on her. _Morgan, get your rear end over here!_ The red cap started running at her, its little legs covering far more ground than they should have.

Her heart pounded in her chest. She could not abandon Morgan here. Who would get to her first?

The redcap was halfway to her.

She pushed herself fully to her feet.

A quarter of the way to her.

She pointed the beam square at its face, hoping to blind it, and took several steps backwards to get a little distance.

Ten feet from her.

A tiny weight landed on her shoulder, screeching all the while.

The green knife swung at her in a horizontal line right at her belly, a blow that would gut her—

—if she were still there. The full-body squeezing sensation swept her away from the field and back to the storeroom where she had slept. Her backwards momentum continued, and she toppled over a low stack of boxes and fell to the ground as brightly colored packages of dried noodles spread out around her.

Wings flapping pulled her attention back to her friend as he landed on her chest and narrowed his beady little eyes at her. She let out an explosive breath and dropped her head onto the hard concrete floor. _Okay, okay. You were right,_ she admitted. _Trying to walk to Bristol tonight was a terrible idea. We'll make the trip in the morning._

Morgan tweeted in victory.

_Oh, shut up,_ she told him with a silent sigh. _You didn't know there were red caps out there, either. You can't claim credit for that._

…_Thank you._ Morgan stopped his song and looked at her again. She gave him a weak smile and reached up to stroke his breast feathers. _For charging in and distracting that thing. He could have crushed you in one blow, but you still tried to keep him off me. That was very brave of you._

This time his call was even prouder.

Picking the songbird off her, she rolled over and slowly pushed herself to her feet. Her face was starting to ache now that she was no longer in terrifying mortal danger, and she staggered out of the room on shaking legs and into the main store. She needed to find a bathroom and see just how bad she looked.

The answer, Hazel discovered a minute later, was awful.

Poking her nose lightly with a finger, she winced and then winced again at the pain the first one caused. Her nose was smushed flat and already starting to swell, and at some point after getting smacked in the face it had started bleeding. Not a little bit, either; the entire front of her shirt, a cute green with horses on it, was now stained red. Blood was smeared over the left side of her face, too, leaking out from a long cut above her eyebrow. Even the lens of her glasses on that side was covered.

First things first. Resting the fingers of her left hand on her cheek beneath her glasses, she half closed her eyes and let brilliant green lightning flicker over her face. Her nose was yanked straight, causing her to gasp, and then it and the skin around her eye turned red then purple then yellow before they went back to the same color as the rest of her.

Even if that was still a few shades paler than she was used to seeing.

Pulling her glasses off and balancing them on top of the pipes leading to the toilet, she twisted the faucets of the sink so she could splash ice-cold water over her face and scrub away the flakes of dried blood. Only when she was starting to shiver did she blindly fumble around for her glasses and stick them under the water as well. She rubbed and rubbed the left side, but the more she did the more she frowned. What were all those bumps?

She pulled the sleeve of her shirt down over her hand to dry the glasses, and once they were back on her face she peered closer at them to find out what was wrong. The answer was immediately obvious. A spiderweb of cracks crisscrossed against the entirely of the left lens. Closing her right eye to look just through the left, she immediately opened it again. There was no way she would be able to see out that side. Everything was just too jumbled together.

_Okay. I can fix this, too_, she told herself. It was not the first time she had fixed these, though at least now she could blame someone other than herself. She pulled her glasses off, and lightning again erupted from her fingertips. After several seconds she cut it off with a frown. That had not felt right, but there was only one way to be sure.

Putting them back on her face, she scowled. No. That was not right. Instead of fixing itself like it had before, getting rid of the cracks entirely, the left lens was… smeared, was the best way she could describe it. It was all in one piece, but all the lines of the cracks were now thicker streaks of a light grey. It was just as impossible to see through as before she tried fixing them, except now it was because she could not see anything through them rather than because the world was shattered like a broken mirror.

What was wrong? She had done this before, back in Shervage Wood and again in Cornwall. What was going on? Was it something the red cap did when it attacked her? She thought harder, remembering what they looked like before they were broken as best as she could. Maybe she just was not focusing enough.

Lightning coursed through her hands, and she tried to hold back the frown at just how wrong this felt. Only now that she was paying attention could she notice how different trying to fix her glasses was to healing herself. Her face had felt warm, as if her magic was sinking into the skin and bones and gently shifting them back where they were supposed to be. With her glasses, it was more like the lightning was wrapping around the plastic and doing its best to put it to rights, but the force behind it was just too much and instead was crushing and cracking her glasses even more.

She brushed a finger over the lens again, and this time there was no hiding her frown. It was no longer cracked, and she doubted it was smeared, but now she could feel ridges of raised plastic dancing over both sides of the lens. She put her glasses on again and stared; where before it was just the lens that was a problem, now the frame itself was warped and twisted. It looked almost as if her spell was starting to melt it.

How in the world was her spell doing so much damage to her glasses and yet could heal her body with no problem? It was not just her that her magic could heal. Even putting that sapling back together had been easier than her glasses, and that was when she had come up with this spell in the first place!

Thinking through her memory, her face gained even more of a pallor. Running out of the bathroom, she looked through the aisles of the store until she found a pack of long wooden skewers meant for grilling. She ripped the package open and pulled one out, then she snapped it over her knee.

_Please don't let me be right_.

Bright green lightning flashed over the two halves of the skewer, reconnecting it and sealing the seam with not a single issue. Concentrating on it as she was, she could also feel how the magic was reacting.

Her spell had sunk into the wood and pulled it together from the inside.

Hazel slid to the floor, the skewer still held tightly in her hands. She could heal herself and a tree, fix a piece of dead wood. All living things, or at least that had been living. Plastic and glass had never been alive. They were manmade, artificial.

And she had already been pretty sure that she and her mum were from a druidic line.

The skewer twisted in her hands, threatening to break once again. She could fix _natural_ things without any problems, but that was because it was from nature where she got her powers. Plastic was not natural. Was nature just too strong for her glasses to hold up when it was trying to fix them?

She took a deep breath in and let it out. _Okay, Hazel. You can deal with this. Bristol is a day's walk from here. Get there, and you can figure out what to do about your glasses. There should be a solution there. Somewhere._

The image of the red cap came to mind again, and she looked at the pointed tip of the skewer. She had one more quick stop to make before she bedded down for the night. Just to be safe.

* * *

**This chapter was supposed to be two scenes, but eh. I'm not opposed to a scene going lots longer that I planned.**

**Hazel's assumption about how magic affects materials isn't **_**exactly**_** right, but she'll learn the truth eventually. Before she reaches Hogwarts age, I'll tell you that much.**

**Silently Watches out.**


	9. The City

**elusivetruth:** Hazel's fixing spell is neither Episkey nor Reparo, but something in between. As for the red cap, she called it a fae because Irish mythology says it is. Of course, it's also present in HP canon, along with other classic fae like leprechauns, hinkypunks/will-o'-the-wisps, kelpies, and fairies (and if house elves AREN'T based on brownies, I'll eat my hat). Is it still around because British folklore classifies just about anything supernatural as "fae" while the mage who did the sealing did not? Is it that the sealing only effected greater, more intelligent fae and left the minor fae alone? Did it alter minor fae in some other way? Hazel has her own thoughts on the matter, and I will keep mine to myself.

**DaSalvatore:** Things have been very snapshot-y so far, I know. And yes, it is mostly because I doubt anybody wants to read twenty chapters about Hazel just walking down the road at night. I know I don't want to write that much tedium, so I'm skipping all that and moving onto the interesting parts. Which isn't really any different than what canon did, to be honest, or most stories that take place over a long time period.

**Guest #2:** I mentioned this to somebody else in PM, but the short version is that vision issues like Hazel's and Harry's aren't _damage_. They are discrepancies between the length of the eye and the focal length of the lens. Therefore Hazel can't fix her eyesight with healing because there's nothing to heal.

**"Wait, hasn't Hazel fixed her glasses before?":** Yes, she has. And back in chapter 6, the second time she did so, she mentioned that it was harder for her to fix them than it had been the first time. This issue she's facing didn't just come out of nowhere.

* * *

**Chapter 9  
****The City**

For all that she left Upper Milton at the crack of dawn the second time, the sun was already sinking below the horizon by the time Hazel hopped off the road proper onto the pavement alongside it. The streets of Bristol lay before her, or at least the neighborhoods that surrounded it. She was sure she would not get to Bristol proper for another hour or two, but she was glad to be back in civilization if only because it meant far less chance for that red cap to try ambushing her again.

Her hand relaxed as her worry subsided, and eventually she let it drop and stretched out her fingers. No longer held in a death grip, the nail she had taken from a hardware store back in Upper Milton fell to dangle around her neck as the shoelace she had tied around it kept it from dropping any farther. It looked like it was iron, or she certainly hoped it was. From the reading she had done about the fae, iron was essentially their one weakness and one she did not want to be without in the future. Just in case.

She had been wondering about that the entire walk here, even as her eyes flickered back and forth around the road to make sure nothing was going to jump at her in the daylight. The sealed portal-gate-thing she found in Glastonbury talked about sealing the fae in their own realm, or that was how she first read it, but she had encountered a murderous fae just a few days later. That had not made any sense, and she thought she had two possible answers that made sense with what she knew.

The first was that maybe it only sealed away the most powerful of the fae, entities like Gwyn ap Nudd who was said to rule one of the Otherworlds that could be reached through Glastonbury Tor. If that was the case, maybe the red cap she ran into was too weak to be driven back when the gate was closed.

The second, and in some ways the scarier one, was that it might only close the road to _one_ of the fairy lands. She had jumped back to Glastonbury when that thought crossed her mind, and sure enough upon a second reading of the plaque it did not say that it kept out all the fae. What it said was that the 'great fae' were banished from Earth, but more specifically the strange room she found closed 'the road to the Greenwild'. If there were multiple fairy realms, just as the Celts described with their talk of multiple Otherworlds, then the Greenwild might only be one such realm. Perhaps the red cap was from a different Otherworld and so was not caught up in whatever happened with the road was closed.

That possibility was the scarier of the two because if it were true, she had no way to guess how many Otherworlds there were and how many still had open roads. For all she knew there were thousands and the sorcerer who built the massive chamber she found had only closed one or two of them.

Morgan let out a birdy yawn and snuggled up into her neck, and she reached up to give him a little scratch. She would love to be able to send him ahead to scout, to see through his eyes somehow, but she did not think that was possible. At the very least she had been unable to feel anything like a mental connection the few times she tried it over the course of the day, and she could not think of any tool that would let her do something like it.

Reaching her arms to the side, she stretched as well as she could with a drowsy pet on her shoulder. Having a scout would be nice, but it was nothing that would make or break her plans for the next couple of days. Her main focus right now needed to be how in the world she was going to restore her ability to see.

Hazel was tempted to reach up and pull off her glasses again, but she had done enough of that already in the last twenty-four hours. When she woke up, she had decided to give fixing her glasses another chance. It did not work any better than the last time. Now the left lens of her glasses was not just covered in ridges, but the frame itself had twisted and dripped and mixed into the lens itself as if they were taffy melding together in the summer heat. She could basically not see anything on that side of her head anymore.

The sun had set completely by the time she left the little towns and entered the metropolis that was Bristol. _What do you think?_, she asked Morgan, rousing the songbird in the process. _Where would be the best place to look for an optician?_

Morgan gave the soft skin of her neck an unhappy peck and shifted on her shoulder again, his message clear. He wanted to sleep, not explore.

She blew out a frustrated breath and kept walking. Several minutes of aimless wandering later, she caught sight of a familiar bright red box. A telephone box, she realized with widening eyes, would be perfect. The book within would not just have phone numbers; it would have addresses, too.

And with an address and a map, she could find anything in this city that she wanted.

Finding the book within the box, she flipped to the yellow pages and ran through the listings until her finger stopped beneath the word 'Optician'. Even more conveniently, there was a map of the city in the first few pages of the book, so she could compare where these places were to where she was now and start walking to the closest one. She had been walking all day already, and while she had gotten used to spending hours and hours on her feet, it did not mean those same feet were immune from getting sore.

Even with the coming of night, there were still plenty of cars and lorries running through the streets of Bristol, so she walked the rest of the way surrounded by her grey smoke of un-noticeability. Was this what living in a big city like this was like, people constantly going around at all times of the day? She hoped not. That would make her… foraging… that much more difficult.

Her destination came into sight after many minutes of searching, and Hazel pressed her hands firmly against the window, followed by her good eye. The inside of the optician's store was dark as the sky outside, clearly closed for the day, and after checking the electric sign outside the bank a few streets down she knew it would remain closed tomorrow. One of the benefits of coming to town on a Saturday night.

Now she just had to decide what to do.

On the one hand, it would not be hard at all to break into the building. She could unlock the door with her key, or she could just jump in with no one being the wiser. She might be able to pop out the lens on her right side and put it in a new pair of glasses, and then they would look right.

On the other, she could still vaguely remember how things went when Aunt Petunia took her to get this pair of glasses back when she had just entered Year 1 and it turned out she needed glasses in the first place. It was not just a matter of picking up a pair and walking out. The man in the shop had measured her vision with a funny-looking device, then he spent an hour or so making the lenses themselves and stuck them in the frames Aunt Petunia chose on the basis of being the ugliest of the available options that she could get for free.

She had no way to measure her own eyes, and she would not know what to do with the numbers even if she did. Switching frames might make them _look_ normal, but it would do nothing to let her see on the left side.

While she could not recall all the details of that day, one thing that still lingered with her was that Aunt Petunia had given her more chores after that to 'pay them back' for buying the glasses even though they had not cost the Dursleys a single penny. They would have cost some amount of money, but Aunt Petunia had a card that made the government pay for them instead. A card that Hazel did not have and that she doubted the Dursleys had kept when she left Privet Drive months ago.

She had not gone back to check, but she fully expected they had burned or thrown away everything that belonged to her and that she had not taken with her.

Regardless, that left her with a situation that had no solution. She could not just steal a new frame, because what was the point of her glasses at all if she could not see out of them? She could not use whatever machine the man here had to make her own lenses, and she doubted she would be able to fiddle around with it for a few hours and get it right. Talking to him was more likely to have him calling the police than giving her a pair of glasses, and she doubted what money she had in her pocket was enough to pay for them even if he did listen to her.

She pointed the index and middle fingers of her right hand out, and her ghostly skeleton key came into sight with a wavering motion and slid into the lock of the door. A twist of her wrist slid the deadbolt out. Pulling the door open and slipping inside as quickly as she could, she peeked through the window to be sure that no one had paid any attention to her entry. She could not find anybody, but she locked the door behind her anyway just to be safe.

The beam from her torch swept around the room and glinted off the dummy lenses of all the glasses on display. An entire wall was taken up by stacks of frames. The back had a small office and a cabinet full of trays holding papers and more frames, but as if to further mock her there was no obvious lens-making machine. Even if she wanted to experiment, she could not.

One hand rose to brush Morgan's feathers again. _Well, this is a problem, no two ways about it_. What was she going to do? It was not as if there was a magical solution to this.

Or was there?

She frowned and lowered her backpack to the ground. She had not found any mention in folklore of people who needed glasses getting rid of them after a spell, but there had also not been any mentions of sorcerers locking down a road to the Otherworld. Just because it was not in folklore did not mean it was impossible or had not happened. It only meant she would need to figure out how to do it on her own. There might very well be a story in some book or another that would give her a starting point. She just had to look for it, which meant she needed to make a run to the local library.

Her stomach gurgled, and she gave it a silent sigh. Fine. Food first, then research.

* * *

Something pricked her ear, and once Hazel was half-awake the bright sunlight shining on her face refused to let her slip back into her dreams. She yawned and tried to sit up, but as she did an awful yanking sensation grabbed at her cheek for a moment before letting go. That woke her up fully, and she rubbed her cheek and looked around.

_I fell asleep in the library_, she realized as she looked around. That was was definitely the most obvious answer for why the table she sat at was surrounded by bookshelves. The table itself was covered by open books, as if the Hazel of last night thought that the more pages visible the better her chances of coming up with a solution.

That version of her deserved praise for her optimism if nothing else.

She had no idea how long she had spent flipping through all the books of druids and wizards in folklore she could find, which had been quite a lot, but none of them held any answers. Maybe it was because spectacles were too new to be included in the old stories, though if she were honest she did not know when they were invented in the first place. Maybe it was because the tellers of folklore did not care about half-blind people like her; that would not be terribly surprising since the deaf and the mute were not exactly well represented in stories either. Or maybe it was because what she wanted, what she was hoping for, just was not possible.

But there had to be some kind of a solution!

She glanced down at the book she had used as her pillow if the drying puddle of drool was any indication. It had started to smear one of the woodcut pictures in the book, specifically a group of druids surrounding a giant statue of a man made of branches and filled with actual people. This book said the idea of the druids performing human sacrifice had little actual evidence, which was comforting, but apparently it was so ingrained in views of the druids and the Celts that the truth might never take the place of the fantasy.

Opening her mouth wide until her jaw cracked, she looked at the picture again, and a strange idea came into her mind. She had no plans of killing anybody or anything at all, but did she have to? Some of the other stories featured deals made with the fae or with wizards, an exchange of one thing for something else.

Would they be interested in anything she had? That was assuming she wanted to deal with them at all. She flipped through the books again, and her eyes fell on a picture of a man talking to an eagle, the caption stating that the eagle was not a bird but a witch transformed. Changing one thing into another may also do it, though she was not sure what she would change into functional glasses.

Or maybe she could make it something that would let her see despite not being strictly speaking a pair of glasses. She would not say no to a bandana or something that would give her the ability to see.

It seemed like either way, she would need to give something up, and her right hand came up to rest against that side of the frame. If she had to sacrifice something, it made sense for it to be something of equal value. Would that be a valid trade, giving up or transforming the one lens that still worked for something else that would let her see?

The idea of such a trade being refused or transformation failing worried her. She could still see okay at a distance without her glasses, but that was a poor consolation prize when everything in range of her hands was just blurs of color. Even just taking the glasses apart would render her functionally blind for near everything she wanted to do.

Morgan waddled up to her and tilted his head curiously, and she gave him a weak smile. _What do you think? Is it worth the risk?_

The blue tit bobbed his head as if to say, _'How would I know? I'm a bird'_.

_Fat lot of good you are_, she told him with a huff. Still the idea would not stop circling around and around in her head. It seemed… appropriate, somehow, that she had to give up her glasses if she wanted to gain another way of seeing. That was one lesson she had learned at Privet Drive that had proven true again and again and again.

She could not get something for nothing. It did not matter if it was money, time, or work; anything worth having would cost her something else. Not even magic could change that.

Pulling off her glasses and holding them in both hands, she blinked at the loss of detail and definition in front of her. If this plan of hers failed, this might be the life she was stuck with. She would be all but helpless and still with no ways of getting a replacement. If anything it would be even harder.

A twist of her hands, and she heard a snap.

It took a bit of wiggling, but she managed to pull the right-side lens from her now thoroughly ruined glasses and dropped the frame onto the table. A smear of blue and yellow moved over and pecked at it. _It's too late to change my mind now_, she told Morgan even as she clutched the lens protectively. If she dropped this… She didn't want to even think about it.

_Come on_, she ordered, holding out her hand for emphasis. The tiny weight of her friend hopped into her hand and fluttered up to his customary perch on her shoulder. _I know just where we need to do this_.

She jumped in place, and her feet landed on soft grass rather than the hard linoleum of the library. The daylight was warm on her head and face, and she smiled at the standing stones that she could not clearly see. When it came to places to make a deal or perform a transformation, she had two choices. First was Wistman's Wood, home of hellhounds and cruel vipers. It might have been the first place she connected with the magic of nature, but it was a little too dark and brooding for what she wanted.

Her other choice was the standing stones of Shervage Wood. It was one of the few places that she was absolutely sure that had been touched by a human's magic. If there was anywhere she could make a deal with a fae or something else that might play gentle with a novice druid like her, it was here.

Lowering herself to the ground, she felt Morgan take off to stand guard over the proceedings. It was now or never.

Just as she had in the other woods, she let herself reach out and become like a tree. Imaginary roots dug and twisted into the dirt, reaching out and out to keep her firmly grounded in this place. And just like a tree, she wanted to drink up drips and drops of the magic around her, to make herself part of the greater world around her.

_Is there anyone here?_, she called out as loudly as she could when her words were entirely silent. _Is there anyone who can hear me? Anyone… Does anyone want to make a deal?_

No one answered her. That was not a surprise; for all that the stories mentioned deal-makers popping up within the first few seconds, she did not expect that to be the case. It was more reasonable to wait a few minutes, even an hour, before giving up any hope or dread that her own personal Rumpelstiltskin had stood her up.

The seconds and minutes ticked by, just her and Morgan and the enchanted memorial to the killing of the Gurt Wurm. Finally she let go of the sigh that had building in her chest. Making a deal, a trade, was clearly not in the cards.

Plan A was a bust. What about Plan B?

The precious lens had sat in her cupped hand for the last hour or so, but now she pulled it closer to her chest and laid her other hand overtop. Transformation was her only option now.

_Okay, Hazel_, she told herself. _You have the lens. Time to turn it into a full set of glasses._

It was hard to imagine just what her glasses looked like in complete detail, mostly because she had never been able to examine them except in the mirror when she was wearing them, but she pictured them as well as she could. Would this even work? She knew changing one thing into another was possible since both folk stories and Aunt Petunia's memories of her mother told her it was, but none of the strange magical things that had occurred around her growing up had ever been one thing changing into another. That was one of many pieces of magic whose 'feel' she did not know.

Still, just because she had never felt it before was not a reason she should not give it a try. She knew it was possible; that was the hardest part. In her mind, she watched the oblong lens shift in shape and color, stretching out and curling around itself into a pair of glasses identical to the one from which she took it. She wanted it to change, _needed_ it.

Lifting her left hand, she felt what was in her hand. It was not a new set of frames, that was for sure.

_Come on. Work!_

She kept imagining what she wanted to happen, and with every attempt she became more and more frustrated. Under normal circumstances, this would have even been a good thing – she already knew that anger served as a useful if unreliable fuel for her spells – but the madder she got, the harder time she had focusing on the image of her glasses.

After several minutes, she had to accept what was right in front of her. This was not happening.

Hazel blew out a harsh breath between her lips, the breath coming out almost as a raspberry, and leaned back to prop herself up with her hands behind her. Great. She was stuck with one functional lens, and even if her broken glasses had not been found and thrown away already, she did not trust that her fixing spell would not melt her good lens. She could have kept the glasses she had and actually been able to see a little bit, but not with what she had left.

Maybe… maybe transformation magic was not in her capabilities. Not yet, at least. Aunt Petunia's memories included watching her mother change a teacup into a mouse, but her mother had been older than she was in the memory, already a teenager. It might become something she could do later on, but that did nothing to solve her problem of how she was meant to see _now_.

Her fingers dug into the thick, strong grass, and her worried scowl softened and became thoughtful. Or maybe she was going about this the wrong way. She had proven to herself with her meditations and her experiments that her magic was deeply connected to nature. She herself did not have the power to change her glasses' lens, but did she have to do it all by herself?

She pushed herself back into a sitting position and let her 'roots' dig into the earth once again. _I need help_, she told anything around her that might be able to hear her. The grass beneath her bum, the standing stones around her, the branches of the trees overhead. _I can't do this on my own, and if I can't see, I can't do anything. I have this_— She held out the lens. —_but it isn't enough on its own. I need something, anything, to give me a hand. Please_.

Her plea, her begging, out for all of nature to hear and reply if it wished, she closed her eyes and let her senses stop focusing on what she wanted to happen. She needed to listen now, if only to know if anything was willing to help.

Soft gusts of wind whispered as they blew.

Wings of birds flapped.

Branches creaked and moved.

Insects buzzed and hummed in the distance.

Blades of grass scraped against each other.

Upright stones grumbled.

And something swirled behind her.

Hazel kept breathing steadily as this something, this unknown, brushed ever so gently around her as it twisted first around her chest and then pushed itself higher almost imperceptibly against her head. The weightless entity rolled down her back and then slithered along her arm. A faint tinkling, like little bells in the distance, was audible just above her hand.

Quick as a blink, the lens was taken from her hand.

The sudden loss caused her to open her eyes and look around, but she could see nothing around her. Not even that she could not see anything with great detail; there was nothing and no one within the stone circle besides herself. She closed her hand to prove to herself that the lens was gone, and then she ran her hands through the grass just to make sure she had not dropped it. That was likewise fruitless.

The lens was just gone.

_You wanted a deal-maker_, she reminded herself as she closed her eyes again. _This is lots better than a creepy old man walking up to you. At least this… whatever it is… only came around when you asked for help._

…_I hope it comes back._

Putting her concerns aside for the moment, she focused again on the feeling of nature all around her and kept her hand stretched out. If the thingy really had stolen her lens, there was no chance of getting it back. But if it was trying to help, or if it had taken the lens in exchange for something else? She wanted to be in the right frame of mind to interact with it.

Long, boring minutes passed in silence, and still she waited. Just as she was wondering for the umpteenth time how long she was willing to wait, something rustled her hair. It did not feel like a hand, more like a breeze stirring the strands, but simple wind could not go back and forth as quickly as that had. The not-hand departed, and she held her breath—

Something bonked her in the face.

Her eyes popped open again only for another wave of tinkling to quickly fade away behind her. She twisted her head to catch as good a glimpse as she could, but nothing was there. What _was_ present, though, was something that had fallen into her left hand. Her fingers ran around the surface, and what they told her was that she was holding a circle of something. Almost breathlessly she lifted it up to her right eye and looked through it.

The standing stones in front of her were clear and crisp, just with a very faint lavender-ish tint laying over everything.

_Yes! Yes, yes, yes!_ Hazel hopped to her feet and turned her head this way and that, looking at how clear everything was again. _Morgan, I can see!_

Her friend twittered his own excitement.

Glancing about the stones again, she yelled as loudly as she could, _Thank you! Thank you so, so much! I can't even tell you how grateful I am._ Nothing replied, but that was not unexpected. Waving Morgan to join her, she jumped again with joy—

—and landed back in the optical shop next to her backpack.

_Okay, okay, okay. Next step, next step. I need to put this in something where I can wear it and not constantly hold it up to my eye._ Almost skipping over to a nearby mirror, she looked at her new lens. It was indeed faintly purple, almost as if it had been carved from a piece of crystal rather than glass or plastic, and it was wider than her lens had been. It would be more at home as a monocle rather than in a pair of glasses. Too bad those went out of fashion about a century before.

Still, the idea of a monocle would not leave her, and she looked around the store again. On that wall of empty frames were several that were metal and contained round frames. Some of them even looked large enough to hold her new lens.

…Surely it couldn't be _too_ hard to modify one of them into something appropriate for a single lens. Could it?

Searching the store, she eventually found a pair of thick, stubby scissors, and then it was a matter of testing out the different frames until she found one that looked like it would fit best. She wrapped both hands around the handles of the scissors and squeezed as tight as she could until the frame went _snap_ and fell apart in two pieces. The larger piece went on her face with the crystal in front, and she looked at her reflection again.

What she saw made her sigh. The little metal bridge above her nose that held the nose pads just looked stupid, and a quick shake of her head made the partial frame go flying off. That was not going to work. She did not want to chance breaking her only means of sight yet again. Which also ruled out monocles, she realized, since those looked like they were even easier to have fall out.

What to do?

She reached down and picked up the cut-up frame and twirled it in her right hand while the left still held the crystal to her eye. Glasses were out of the question, a monocle would not work, so what was she going to do? How was she going to hold this crystal lens on her face where she had both hands available to do what she needed to do?

Catching sight of her reflection again, an idea wormed its way into her head.

Looking through her crystal only occasionally, she went back to work, this time with the half of the frame she had put aside as scrap. The shears went snip again, cutting off the leg right next to the frame, and then a third time to cut the circle open. She popped the fake lens out and fitted the crystal in place. Good enough, and the little bit of extra room from the frame being just the tiniest bit too big was actually perfect for her plan. She dug into her backpack again and pulled out a shoestring, the twin to the one she had tied around the nail dangling from her neck. One end went around one side of the frame, the other went around the other, and after a few adjustments she slotted the crystal in place with only a little bit of effort. Green lightning, the only clear thing in her field of view, crackled and snapped, and then she was done.

She picked up her project and held it up to her face. As soon as her eyes landed on her reflection, she could not hold the giggles in. _This looks so dumb_, she told Morgan while looking more intently at her reflection. Rather than chance having the frame fall off, she had pinned the shoestring between the frame and the lens, leaving just enough room that she could slip the whole thing over her head. It was now more of an eyepatch than anything else, and combined with her uneven and scraggly hair that she needed to cut short again she looked like a young mad scientist about to play with her first chemistry set.

The colorful bird hopped over and gave her a burst of worried song.

She waved off his concern. _It's fine. I mean, yes it looks silly as can be, but it doesn't matter to me whether I look silly or not. Who is going to care? What matters is that I can see, and this won't come off_. Giving the two ends of the shoestring a quick tug, she pulled them back and carefully tied them to the headband portion of string to make them stop dangling. Another look at her work, and she gave herself a nod.

Was it the perfect solution? Absolutely not. Would it do? Yes it would. And, she noticed after rolling her eyes to check if she could still see clearly when she looked around, the vision out of her one good eye might even be a little wider than it had been when she wore mundane glasses. That would help when all she saw out of her left eye were still just blurs.

Through the windows she could see the sun beginning to set. She had not thought she spent that much time out in the woods. _It's only the middle of March_, she thought to herself after checking the calendar that hung from the wall. _That means I have just under a month until I need to be in Derbyshire. I don't want to miss it, but it won't take a month to get there. A week, week and a half to be on the safe side._

She nodded to herself. She had two weeks for sure with nothing she needed to do, and she was in a big city with a good-sized library nearby. Maybe it was time for a bit of a break to relax. She could afford it.

* * *

**The second scene went in a VERY different direction than I had planned. I guess after powerful fae and then literal gods showed up in my stories, the minor spirits decided they wanted their turn in the spotlight. How that's going to change things moving forwards, I do not know but am a little nervous about.**

**I did a bit of digging into the details of how the NHS's vision coverage worked back in the 1980s into early 1990, but I couldn't find a whole lot. As such, Hazel's thoughts on how Petunia bought her glasses may not be totally accurate. I hope you can all forgive me.**

**Relatedly, my headcanon has always been that Harry is farsighted. Mostly because the description of what he sees without his glasses doesn't match my own experience of being nearsighted.**

**Silently Watches out.**


	10. The Pool

**E8rocks23:** I don't have a drawing of Hazel's eyepatch-monocle-thing on hand, as I'm unfortunately not much of an artist. The best comparison I can come up with would probably be Mad-Eye Moody (film version) and his eye, except instead of a metal frame holding a magic eyeball in place there's a faintly purple lens.

**DiLayla:** She feels that her magic works better on organic objects, but manipulating plants and wood to reshape them is something she doesn't know how to do.

**Pramheda17:** If you think this story is moving towards Hazel becoming a "badass, ass-kicking, killing machine", you are going to be greatly disappointed.

"**Did Hazel trade a lens… for a different lens?":** Pretty much. It wasn't her initial plan, obviously; if you think it was, that would explain why so many of you seem confused. What she WANTED was to trade her lens for either a full set of glasses or something that wasn't glasses but would still allow her to see. What she got was honestly the more equitable trade. Would she have been able to skip the trade entirely and done the same thing with her old glasses? Sure, though with how warped and melted the old frames were, it wouldn't have been as clean. Not to mention that by the time she even thought about doing that, she had already made the trade, and even if she hadn't she had already snapped that frame in two and left it unattended in the library for a few hours. The chances of her getting those frames back in the first place were low.

* * *

**Chapter 10  
****The Pool**

Huffing and puffing, Hazel shot Morgan a glare as she continued walking up the slope. She had not realized when she put the Peak District on her itinerary that it was going to be so much harder a walk than what she had done before, although considering the name she really should have figured out that there would be hills and mountains. She wanted to and had smacked herself for not thinking about it earlier, but it was too late. She was committed, and she really wanted to see the pond.

This was as good a time as any to take a break, though, and she sank to the dirt and stretched out her aching legs. A minute later Morgan dropped onto her head and settled himself in. _I hope you enjoyed that_, she told him. She did not begrudge her friend the chance to stretch his wings – she didn't! – but she would be lying if she claimed she were not jealous of his ability to fly over the rough ground. She did not have such an easy time. In fact, she only had two options if she wanted to climb this hill, and both were showing distinct disadvantages.

She rolled her head around and around, doing her best to loosen the tight muscles. It had been long enough that it should be okay to skip walking for a while. A look up at the cloudy sky which had nonetheless been darkening for a while now, and she also knew this would probably be the last time she could safely do this for today. It was hard to tell whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.

Pushing herself back to her feet, she looked up the slope again. Tensing her legs, she made a small hop—

—and landed higher up on the slope. She spent just enough time to pick her next jump—

—before she teleported again—

—and again—

—and again.

Three hills over from where she started, she took a deep breath in and slowly let it out as she did her best to ignore the pounding headache that had settled behind her eyes. The headache was not even the worst part. No, that honor belonged to the strange feeling deeper in her head, as if her brain was taffy that had been stretched and kneaded and twisted the more she jumped. A bit of rest would let that settle, but as the day had gone on and she jumped more and more, she quickly learned that feeling would come on quicker and take longer to leave. When she started, it had taken what she guessed was fifteen or sixteen jumps before she could go no farther; now it was only five jumps before her brain protested the abuse.

Her current strategy probably did not help matters. This 'snap-jumping' she had taken to doing, jumping from one place to the next as soon as she landed, was one way to cover lots of ground in a matter of seconds and try to out-pace the headache and stretched brain feeling, but they were guaranteed to catch up sooner or later.

She shook her head and looked into the distance, her right eye closed so she could look only out of her left. Her eyepatch-monocle was wonderful for looking at things close up, but one trick she had discovered was that when she ignored that lens and only saw things with her left eye that was uncovered, her long-range vision was better than she could ever remember it being. It was thanks to that vision that she could just make out a hill peak a good distance away and quite a bit higher than the one she stood on now.

_I think I have enough for one more before I have to stop_. Her fingers reached up to pat Morgan's back. _Hold on tight_.

The next instant her feet landed on a slab of rock, and she nearly fell over as a wave of nausea swept over her. For but a moment she pitted her will against the feeling of sick, but then her will lost. She fell to her knees and hurled, emptying out what little was still in her stomach. This was not the first time today she had been forced to vomit by the now skull-splitting headache, but it would be the last. She could not take more of that.

Hazel rolled over away from the sick and laid on her side with her knees drawn up to her chest. That last jump was a mistake, and she was paying for it now. The headache had hit her with its full force, and her eyes burned with unshed tears behind lids that were squeezed tight. Just moving was enough to make her head throb even harder, no longer being pounded against by a small hammer but now with one the size of a house. It would pass, this she knew. She just needed to wait it out, and the waiting was the hardest part.

Half an hour passed, maybe a full one. Long enough that what little light could pierce through the clouds fell below the horizon, and finally the pain had receded enough that she could try moving. Pushing herself upright again and wiping her mouth, she winced at the ear-piercing sound of Morgan's soft concerned coo. _Please don't_, she told him. _I need a little quiet for a while longer, okay?_

With her capacity for jumping clearly used up for the day and unwilling to make her headache any worse again, she continued on foot deeper into the darkness. This pond had better be worth it.

* * *

The moon was low in the sky but the sun still thankfully out of sight when the beam from her torch touched a smooth black stretch of water. Staggering to the edge, Hazel gratefully sat and looked out into the night. She had made it, and before dawn to boot. Now she just had to wait.

This was the only place on her list of places to visit that had a hard time limit, and she knew she had cut it extremely close. If legends were right, this pond, appropriately named the Mermaid Pool, was said to hold an immortal mermaid who would only come out and be seen at sunrise on Easter morning. Those legends also said that if it was an attractive young man staring into the pond, she would grant him immortality like her own, but that was something Hazel did not have to worry about.

As minutes turned into an hour and more, she nibbled on her lip in thought. _What's our plan?_, she finally asked Morgan. _After this it's a week to get to Cockermouth and Elva Hill, but what should we do afterwards? That's the last place I found that sounded like it might have something magical, but…_

That was the problem, wasn't it? She had seen some really neat things, places of magic that had been long forgotten by the world, but that was not everything she was looking for. She also had been on the hunt for any signs of _modern_ druids and sorcerers, but so far she had yet to find anything on that score.

Honestly, she was starting to feel a little dejected. More than a little, really. Was this all there was, remnants of a lost world and testaments of what was possible but with no information on how to get there? Were her mum and she really the last of the magicians to walk the world?

_It's hard to believe that could be true_, she told her friend, even if her words were more for herself. _One witch, sorceress, whatever, in the entire world? To be the only one left in Britain is strange enough, but the whole world?_

A thought came to her mind, and she frowned as she turned it over and over in her head. _Then again, what if everyone else is just like me?_

It would actually make quite a bit of sense. Which was more likely, that there was a large group or even an entire society of druids and witches who vanished and lived in the shadows for several hundreds of years if the dates of different pieces of folklore were to be believed? Or that something dreadful happened, and while people like her were still around, maybe even coming back, nobody knew who and where anybody else was, so they all stumbled around in the dark of ignorance?

For all she knew, there could be thousands of people just like her, people to whom strange things happened, and despite being so many they could all be just as alone as she was.

It was definitely possible, but if so, how was she supposed to find these people?

Hazel pondered and pondered, but no answer presented itself. Eventually her thoughts were interrupted when the first light of day crested over one of the many hills and mountains in the distance. Her brain shook off the fog that had settled over her thoughts, and she jumped to her feet. Was she about to see the mermaid? Would it look like the pictures in all the books?

A small breeze stirred the surface of the water. The sun fully rose and sunlight washed over the pond…

…and nothing happened.

Leaning over, she looked into the pool as best she could. Nothing.

Puffing out her cheeks, she eventually sighed. She had the right day, she had made sure of that, but it looked like just like Stonehenge, there was nothing to see here. She shook her head and walked back to her backpack. Might as well get a move on to her next destination.

Something splashed behind her.

Hazel whirled around, her heart pounding in her chest. Out in the middle of the pond something was poking out of the water, something shiny and silver and scaled. It shifted, and a forked tail rose out of the water and plunged right back in. She ran over, her bag forgotten on the ground, and splashed into the pond for a few feet. Eagerly she looked into the water, trying to get a better glimpse of the mermaid.

As far as she could see, the aptly named Mermaid's Pool was empty once again.

* * *

Bright sunlight beat down upon her. Sweat dripped down her brow and her back. Her shirt stuck to her, and she flapped the hem of her jumper to try forcing some air up the back of her shirt to cool herself off.

Finally Hazel could stand it no longer. She dropped her backpack onto the ground and tugged off the jumper, sighing when she was no longer covered up quite so much.

The day after Easter had brought a heat wave to England, and that meant clothing that had been appropriate while the world was cold and grey was now very much overkill. She had already stuffed her puffy coat into the bag, and even that had been a chore considering how much space it took up. She had to sacrifice the amount of food she carried with her at a time, a decision she was already coming to regret, but to add the thick woolen jumper into that limited space as well?

She looked at the jumper in her hands and the stuffed backpack at her feet before shaking her head. No, that just was not going to happen. Settling herself onto the warm grass, she twisted and untwisted the jumper around her hands. What was she going to do?

The simplest answer, of course, was to find someplace to put her belongings when she did not need them. That was what most people did, storing seasonal clothing in boxes or in closets until they were needed once again. There was just one very, _very_ big problem with that: she did not have anywhere in which to store her things. She owned no house that would be safe while she wandered. She could try to hide a box, maybe even several boxes, in a random building and hope nobody noticed them for the months she left them unattended, except she did not trust her luck that far. A related possibility was to spread her things in several places like a squirrel hiding nuts. It would make the piles less noticeable, and those places could be spaced wide apart since her jumps made distance meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

The downside was that while it would lessen the chance of all her things being found at the same time, she would probably go even longer between visits to any particular stash. The longer the time involved, the more chances other people had to find them.

Not to mention, and this reason was purely her, she actually kind of… _liked_ the feeling of having everything she needed right there with her. After spending her whole life in the same place, to be free to wander was amazing. Carrying everything on her back meant she never had to be tied down anywhere.

Keeping everything on her back limited how much she could carry, though. That lead to another option: she could toss away things she no longer needed and grab more when the weather changed again. As she looked down at her ankles that were poking out from the hems of her jeans, she knew she would have to do something like that anyway. She was starting to get taller, which meant she would need new clothes sooner or later anyway.

The downside was that throwing things away and picking out new ones all the time would require her to steal more. She did not like doing that any more than she absolutely had to. She had continued to pick pockets here and there, mostly so she could leave at least some money any time she had to rob a small store rather than a big supermarket, and while she had broken three digits a few times she tried not to take much and still did so only sparingly. She would much rather keep what she had until she absolutely had to get rid of something because it no longer fit.

But if she did not want to hide her things and she did not want to throw them away unnecessarily, what was she to do? She flicked a glare at her overstuffed backpack, which was now serving as Morgan's perch. This would be so much easier if her backpack just had more space inside!

…huh.

She looked at her bag again with more assessing eyes this time. She might be crazy, but she was pretty sure she remembered a few different fantasy stories where the resident wizard had pockets or a bag or even an entire tower that was bigger on the inside than it looked like on the outside. There was even a movie that she could vaguely remember Dudley watching once, something about a family getting a new governess. Dudley had gotten bored with it because there was too much music and no action, but part of the one scene she had been able to watch before Aunt Petunia shooed her out of the room involved the governess pulling a number of ridiculous things out of her big bag.

And now that she was thinking harder about it, had Aunt Petunia really thought that if she watched it she might get ideas? She did not trust her memory of years ago that much, but she was definitely getting ideas now.

First things first. Waving for Morgan to hop off, she opened her backpack and dumped everything onto the ground. Her fingers moved, rubbing the material of the bag between them, and she pushed away the thought that wanted to spring up. Instead she shoved her arm into the main pocket as deep as it could go and grabbed both sides of the opening with her other hand. _Push!_, she told herself, and she pushed with the hand inside and pulled with the one outside. She pulled with all her strength, confident that even at her strongest she would not be able to rip it in half.

All her pulling got her was sore fingers. The dimensions of the bag's inside refused to change.

_Maybe I'm not wanting it hard enough?_ It was not the only answer in front of her, but it was the simplest to fix. Want, need, had been the answer to more than a few of her early issues with magic. She focused her mind just on what she wanted and ignoring everything else around her, a trick she had picked up as a result of her practice with meditation, and pushed and pulled again. _You __**will**__ get bigger_.

Still nothing.

She looked at the bag again and thought for a moment longer. Maybe it being full would help sell her subconscious minds on the fact that it needed to be bigger? The clothes and the cans and last her coat went back in, and once more she pushed with her mind and her hand. She was going to do this!

A minute of fruitless effort later, she sighed and let her hands fall to her side. She was worried this would be the case. Once again she rubbed the side of the backpack in resignation. Her backpack was not made of cotton or wool. It was some plasticky fabric, and as she had learned from fixing her glasses, a druid's magic and plastics did not get along. _That_ was the reason she could not get this to work.

_So I just need something not plastic. That'd be easier if I ever saw any of the other kids at school come in with natural-looking backpacks, but I didn't. Not that I can think of anyway_. She looked to the side to find Morgan sitting on the ground just watching her. _Do you have any ideas?_

Morgan tilted his head and twittered at her in obvious confusion. The sounds turned almost scolding, and she had no trouble figuring out what that meant. She supposed she had no one to blame but herself for assuming a wild songbird would know anything about school supplies.

Flopping backwards onto the grass, she turned the problem around and around in her head. Her backpack was plastic. All the backpacks she had ever seen were plastic of some kind. Were there backpacks made of natural cloth somewhere, almost certainly, but she did not know where she would even be able to find such a thing. So that plan was out.

If she could not find one… could she make one instead?

Hazel pushed herself up and looked all over her backpack again, taking in the details that normally she would pay no attention to. The zipper she knew she would not be able to make, so unless she found something that already had one attached she would have to figure out some other way of closing it. Sewing straps on would be tricky too since she had never sewn a thing in her life, but there was no way it could be that hard.

A cloth bag, strips of cloth for straps, some way to close it up. Those were doable! She just had to find them, and thankfully there was a little town just a couple of hours away that she could search. Hopefully she could find the right materials at the local Tesco, because if not she would have to search everywhere else. _And while I'm there, I might as well see if there's anything I can use as it is without having to make anything at all_, she reminded herself.

The sun was setting when she slipped out of the blue-and-white Tesco building back into near-empty streets, her grey 'ignore me' smoke wrapped around her and a frown on her face. That had been less than useful. There were plenty of bags, even a few backpacks, but they all felt like they were made of either plastic or, in the case of the more expensive handbags, leather. The leather probably would have worked, but the bags themselves were so small that she had trouble imaging fitting some of her belongings through the opening even if there was plenty of space inside. Her coat had been hard enough to get into her backpack as it was.

Not only that, the only option she could find for making a new backpack that fit all her criteria was one of the paper bags people used to carry their purchases out in, and she did not want to chance her bag tearing and dumping out everything she had. Particularly considering all the times she had walked through the rain. She shuddered at the thought. No, not those. Anything but those.

Unnoticeable by anyone who might have paid attention to her, Hazel wandered the streets and looked for any store that might have something she could use. The street lamps came on, the few cars still on the streets became fewer and fewer. She sighed and shook her head. Might as well give it up for tonight—

Morgan fluttered down to her shoulder and pecked her ear.

_Ow!_ She rubbed her earlobe and turned her head to glare at him as best she could. _What was that for?!_

The blue tit jumped off her shoulder and flew over to a bench. Turning to look back at her, he sang a victorious burst of song. Still unclear just what he was doing, she started walking towards him only for him to jump off the bench and keep flying away from her until he settled himself up high on a lamppost. He sang again, the sound almost taunting.

_What in the world has gotten into him?_

She followed after her friend for several minutes, sometimes jumping right next to him to get back at him for leading her on this wild goose chase, but eventually he flew in a few circles up in the air before gliding back to his customary spot on her shoulder. Her eyes stared at the building before them and went back to him. _A pet store. You decided to be a pain in the you-know-what just to take me to a pet store?!_ Morgan sang again, and she shook her head. _You get fed enough, you greedy boy. Do you really need that much more bird seed—_

_Wait. Wait just a minute_. Morgan's song was turning decidedly smug, but she was not looking at him. Her eyes were back on the store in disbelief.

She had never had a pet, nor had Dudley, but she had seen advertisements on the telly. Pet food oftentimes came in bags.

If Morgan was right… She did not know how she would feel if his idea worked out, mostly because being outsmarted by a bird would sting her pride like nothing else. Steeling herself, she pulled her torch out of a side pocket of the backpack and shined it through a window into the darkened store. A tug on the door proved the store to be locked up for the night—

—but a quick jump and she was inside nonetheless.

Walking through the aisles, she stopped in her tracks when her eyes found something she could use. Most of the bags she had seen so far were plastic, but now her torchbeam landed on a pile of bags that did not look like the others. Her hand reached out, and sure enough these were not slick and shiny. There were made of a rough cloth, burlap if she had to guess although she knew she did not know all the kinds of cloths in the world.

_Okay_, she finally told Morgan, _you were right. I didn't know they sold some kinds of dog food in burlap bags, but that will work._ He gave the world a high-pitched cheer, but she ignored his celebrations to focus instead on picking up the bag. Twenty-five kilos was not exactly light, particularly for her. _Nope_, she decided after a minute's struggle. She was not going to try carrying that away. She would have to start working with it here.

Which would be a lot easier if she could figure out how to tear it open.

Pulling off her backpack, she set it on the ground and pointed at both her backpack and the bag of dog food with her eyes firmly on Morgan. _Stay here and guard these_, she told him. _I'll be back_.

She could not tear the bag open, but she could cut it. The Tesco had a few backpacks even though it was swinging into spring, and in that same section of the store were various other school-type supplies. That included pads of paper, boxes of pens and pencils, and several different sizes of scissors and shears. The last would be the best thing with which to cut through the thick fabric bag. Picturing what the aisle looked like during the day, she jumped into the air.

Her trainers squeaked on the wet linoleum tiles of the store, nearly sending her to the ground. Why was the floor wet?!

"Bloody hell!"

Her head whipped around to find a man standing a few feet away, a bucket by his feet and a mop in his hands. He stared at her with wide eyes, as surprised by her arrival as she was by his presence in the first place. She turned her head enough to see where the shears were hanging and quickly grabbed one.

"How did you even— Hey, put that back!"

Another jump returned her to the pet store, and she ripped the plastic wrapping off the shears and gave them a couple of experimental snips. These should work out just fine. Grabbing the corner of the top dog food bag, she started cutting, brushing strands of hair out of her face when they brushed against her forehead. The seam on the bottom came free, and kibble spilled all over onto the ground.

Morgan twittered in delight when she picked the half-empty bag up to get the rest out, and she waved the hand still holding the shears at the pile of dry food. _Eat all you want. You definitely earned it._ With him otherwise occupied, she carried the bag a few feet away and dropped it on the ground. All she had to do now was figure out how to turn it into a backpack.

Green eyes looked at the bag, at how it fell, and she sucked on her bottom lip as another idea came to her. Maybe she did not have to turn into a backpack, exactly. The way it had folded over on itself, it actually looked a lot like a satchel. She had seen some of the students in the upper years wear them, and while she had never thought about wearing one herself, it would be easier to make than a proper backpack.

Folding the bag in half more evenly, she nodded at it and started cutting along both sides, going from the opening she had made to the fold, repeating the process on the other side, and then lifting one of the flaps she had made so she could cut along the front. The square of burlap left in her hands she tossed behind her. Lifting and lowering the flap still attached, she nodded again. That did not look half bad.

It was still covered in kibble bits, though, but that was a problem she could fix. Ripples of blue light washed over the bag, causing all the pieces of dog food to disappear from sight. The same ripples covered the shears for a moment before they too were clean. Snapping them open and closed again thoughtfully, she reached up and pulled some of the strands of hair down until they were nearly at her nose.

Her hair was getting long, and it had been months since Aunt Petunia had cut her hair. She had always hated how short her aunt left it, how it made her look almost like a boy, but now it was getting long enough to be annoying. It was also far too short for her to do anything useful with it like putting it in pigtails or a ponytail the way other girls at school did. It might be better to go ahead and cut it again. Not as short as Aunt Petunia used to do, not that short by any means, but short enough that it would not flop around in her face like it was.

Something to think about after she was done with her current project.

With the bag cut into shape, she just needed a way to wear it, and she had just the idea.

An hour later, she was done. A long piece of rope taken from the same hardware store in Upper Milton where she grabbed the nail that hung around her neck was attached to both sides of the bag thanks to a lot of thread stolen from an arts and crafts store in the same town, the thread admittedly clumsily sewn through the bag itself and around the rope. Glue helped keep it all together, and she had also glued a piece of cloth around the top of the loop of rope to keep it from rubbing her neck raw.

Most everything she had used, the bag and the rope and the thread and the cloth, were natural. The glue itself she was a little unsure about, but that was a risk she just had to take.

_Moment of truth_, she told Morgan, who had absolutely gorged himself on dog food and was now sitting on the ground like a big puffball of multicolored feathers. Her attention moved back to the bag, and she curled and uncurled her fingers. Sliding her right arm into the bag, she imagined as forcefully as she could the bag getting bigger and bigger and bigger inside, until…

The edge of the bag reached her shoulder, her arm within still straight and reaching past the bottom of the bag.

She pulled her hand back out and looked at it, then she laughed as hard as she could. It was probably a good thing she was both mute and alone, for if she could make a sound she suspected her laugh would be more of a cackle. It worked! _It worked!_

Her backpack went into the bag, then her puffy coat, then all the cans and the can opener and the extra batteries and her wad of money. The outside looked just the same as it had before she put everything inside, so she pulled the front and back apart to look into the bag. There was still a hand-span of space between the top can and the edge of the bag, and she suspected that if she kept forcing things into it, she would just find more space.

_Let's grab a bag to put some more of that kibble in_, she told her friend. _It would be a waste to leave it all behind when you did such a good job finding this place. Then we'll sleep here tonight and start moving again at first light._

_And in the morning, we can also find more food for me since I can carry a lot more now._

* * *

**Some of the details in Hazel's analysis of what to do with her seasonal clothes were added in response to reviews suggesting she create a base. I **_**do**_** read and think about all your reviews, even if I don't put a reply at the top of the chapter. Sometimes it works better slipped into the text itself.**

**And speaking of chapters in general, only one more of exploring England before it's time for Hazel to move on and start meeting some actual other characters. I know it has taken a while to get to this point, but some of the things she needed to see and do and learn just wouldn't have been possible were she getting guidance and advice from other people.**

**Silently Watches out.**


	11. The Hill

**Guest #1, ro781727:** As far as Hazel could see, there was no mermaid in the pool when she waded into the water. Which, considering a previous encounter, should make you wonder just what she _really_ saw…

**Winlyn:** She's bumping against a real truth of magic when it comes to natural materials, but she made a few assumptions early on that are skewing her conclusions. Don't worry, somebody with more knowledge of what she's doing will straighten her out soon enough.

**Silent. Storm:** You're correct, the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad is a thing in canon. The problem is that it's not clear just what their job really is. We know they were called out when Harry blew up Marge, but we never hear about them any other time. My personal conclusion, then, is that like the Obliviators (with whom they share a department) they don't go out to every magical event in the Muggle world but rather only get called out when something is so obvious that the average Muggle would notice it. Hazel normally stays out of sight, but I wouldn't be surprised if word about a janitor talking about an appearing-and-disappearing girl makes it to their ears.

"**Wow, making a bottomless bag is so easy!":** Heh heh heh. Not quite. I'll get more into it later (it's actually a fairly major plot point), but for now suffice it to say that Hazel wouldn't have had such success had she found a canvas backpack or used one of the leather purses. In fact, I will go as far as revealing that she didn't _CAST_ anything...

* * *

**Chapter 11  
****The Hill**

Her belly flat against the grass, Hazel switched her gaze repeatedly from the red sun hanging low on the horizon to the circle formed on the ground by a ring of standing stones. She was still a hundred meters or so away from the stones, and between the distance and laying on the ground and being covered by her ignore-me smoke, she was reasonably confident that she could not be seen. Unseen was how she wanted to be until after nightfall.

She knew she was probably being paranoid, but this was Elva Hill! A place where fairies were said to gather. There was no way she was drawing attention to herself until she knew there were not going to be creatures like the red cap that wanted to eat her guts and grind her bones for bread. At least on the flip side, she was so small that if giants truly existed they should not see her unless she really wanted.

The sun sank out of sight, and soon shadow covered the world. Still Hazel waited, but despite her patience nothing was happening. It was quiet as a grave all around.

_Maybe I'm worried about nothing_, she wondered. Morgan had no answer for her, and she glanced over to find him sitting on her satchel, puffed up and letting out a cute little birdy snore. Despite herself she found a smile on her face, so shaking her head she returned her attention to the stone circle.

An hour passed. Two. Nothing happened.

_Now I feel dumb_. Pushing herself up from the ground, she used her magic hand to lift Morgan onto her shoulder and pick up her bag. Her friend woke up just enough to sidle closer to the warmth of her neck, and she started walking towards the stones. Maybe that was the problem? She had not exactly had a lot of luck with stone circles, as Stonehenge clearly attested. Even the stones in Shervage Wood, though connected to magic in the story they told, were made by regular humans…

…What was glowing in the center of that circle?

Hazel took a quick step back, suddenly worried that she might not have been patient enough.

The light instantly winked out again.

A step forward, the glowing something or other returned to the circle. A step back, it was gone. She repeated the movements a few more times before she had to accept that whatever this thing was, it was only appearing when she got within a certain distance. Her legs tense and ready to jump her out to anywhere else, she slowly walked closer and closer.

She halfway expected that the shorter the distance, the brighter it would become. What happened instead was that the colored blur became crisper and more detailed. She stopped at the edge of the stone circle and stared.

Hanging in the air was a… She had no words to describe it. A crack? Yes, a crack or a squiggle, glowing a faintly off-yellow and spinning slowly as it floated there. While it was turning, the individual lines that created it shifted or lengthened or shortened, changing the design from moment to moment but not the overall shape. She had never seen anything like this, nor had she even heard or read of it. What in the world was it?

And why had no one ever mentioned this thing existing before? This was not like the stone circle in Shervage Wood, which was out in the middle of the woods where people were unlikely to go. Elva Hill was a well-known landmark with regular visitors. Surely someone had seen it before her!

Closing her left eye, she examined it more thoroughly. Her lens made it easier for her to see things close up, so maybe if she only looked at this thing with that eye, she might find an additional clue. Sadly all it did was make the edges of the crack a bit more crisp, not as fuzzy.

Opening both eyes made the crack go blurry for a second, and a suspicion bloomed in her mind. Could it be that simple? Unsure just what she was hoping for, she closed her right eye this time.

The crack vanished.

Her right eye opened up again, and when the anomalous rip in the world itself returned her hand lifted up to the frame strapped to her head and more specifically to the faintly purple lens set within it. The lens she received by trading the lens from her old glasses with… something. A spirit or fairy or something else entirely.

That thought caught up with the rest of her mind, and she took several hasty steps away from the circle. She could only see this with a magical lens, which meant it was _very_ magical. Maybe she was wrong, and she hoped she was, but she feared that this answered a question she could have happily gone her entire life without getting answered.

Beneath Glastonbury Tor, a magician from long ago had sealed the road to the Greenwild. Clearly he did not get around to closing the doors to all the _other_ Otherworlds.

Hazel's hand rose to hover protectively over Morgan's sleeping body, and with a jump she vanished from Cockermouth and reappeared in the pet store where she made her bag. Whatever monstrous fae slept near Elva Hill, it could continue napping. She wanted nothing to do with it.

Heart slowing down now that she was a week's walk away, she sat down on a small table off to the side of the glass doors. _That's the last place on my list_, she realized after a few minutes. All the potentially magical sites in England she found scouring the books in the library in Greater Whinging, she had visited. Four months spent on the road, and she was no closer to finding another magical person.

…What was she going to do now?

_I don't have anything else to do. Sure, I could go back to Tintagel and swim through the cold water, but that was something I wanted to wait to do until the summer, and even if I did that, I still wouldn't have anything after. I had hoped to find something that pointed me to other druids, even just the tiniest hint, but there was nothing. Even if I'm right and there are other people like me who have powers but don't have a dedicated meeting place, I still wouldn't be able to find them. I don't know how many there are in England, let alone anywhere else._

_There has to be __**something**__! Somebody had to have written something down. Museums and stuff have books from hundreds of years ago, and people stopped believing in magic not that long ago. There just… there can't be nothing left._

She sighed and let her head fall against the wall behind her. _Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places? I don't know where else I would look, but I haven't found anything, so it's possible. Likely, even._

Running through her memories of the various fairy tales and folklore stories she had read over the months, she tried to think of where else she could search. Wales and Scotland had similar stories to England, but if she found nothing here, what were the chances she would get lucky there? Ireland she had already ruled out, both because she did not want to run into the fae that infested the island and because she did not want to run into the IRA. That was the British Isles covered, which meant she would need to look farther afield.

The Continent, then.

_France isn't __**too**__ far away. I could catch a ferry from… I think it's Dover?_ Her face scrunched up. _I think so, anyway. Some fairy tales come from France, after all, and it's next to Germany. The Brothers Grimm definitely had a lot of witches and magical beasties in their stories. I don't know any French, which will be a problem, but maybe I could pick up a dictionary or something?_

…_Not to mention, it would be a lot warmer than here_.

She pulled off her satchel, waking up Morgan in the process, and started pulling things out. That was the one downside of this magical bag: she could stuff whatever she wanted into it, but to get to anything specific she had to take out everything that was on top of it. Finally she found a wad of paper, and removing the elastic bands she unfolded her various maps of England.

France was close to Dover, she confirmed after a quick look, so that would be the first place to check. Was there anywhere she had been that was nearby, somewhere she could jump to and shorten just how far she had to walk?

A laugh escaped her when she looked at all the circles she had drawn depicting the sites she wanted to visit. The closest potential magical site was Stonehenge, which meant the place she should go to start her walk was actually Greater Whinging of all places! She shook her head and started packing everything back up into her bag. This was also a good time to check on Stonehenge again now that she knew her lens could reveal the gates to Otherworlds. She had to know if something like that had been there the first time she visited. A jump—

—landed her in the ancient stone circle. She looked around. No crack or ripple, no spirits, just the stones themselves. There really was nothing magical here—

—so she reappeared outside the library in Greater Whinging. Hitching her bag on her shoulder, she breathed out her ignore-me smoke and started walking eastward. She barely got fifteen feet before a car backfired loudly in the alley on the other side of the library, making her jump in sudden surprise. She turned around to give the unseen car a glare at scaring her.

It was only because she was looking that way that she saw two men stepping out from the alley.

Hazel blinked a couple of times and stared. She had to be dreaming because the alternative was that two grown men were standing in front of the Little Whinging library wearing bathrobes and bright blue capes. Maybe they were homeless, and that was why they were wearing such things? A longer glance, and she shook her head. The robes did not look worn out or patched up, and the capes looked identical. These were not things they had picked up from a charity bin and wore because they had nothing else.

She had thought it a few times before, and she would think it again: grown-ups were _weird_.

"Think our perp's around here still?" the shorter of the men asked, looking around at the empty streets. "_I'm getting tired of the wild goose chase. Though I can't see why she'd come __**here**__ of all places. Nothing worth seeing._"

Despite herself, Hazel nodded her head in agreement with the oddball man. Greater Whinging might be bigger than Little Whinging, but from her experience in the town, there was nothing 'great' about it.

The tall man grunted. "Probably not. _Mudblood_ bitch has been Apparating all over the country for the last couple of months. _The boss wanted us to bring her to the Ministry, but the Muggle-lovers higher up would probably let her go with a slap on the hand and a pat on the head. Be better to Obliviate her entirely and be done with it_."

A shiver ran down her spine at the sound of that word and the viciousness with which the man thought it. Admittedly, she did not know what it was, but the sound of it was _much_ too close to _'oblivion'_ and _'obliterate'_ for her peace of mind. She knew what _those_ words meant.

Spinning on one heel, she walked briskly away and left the bathrobe-wearers to their conversation about 'Mudblood' and 'Apparating', whatever those were. She did take a moment to spare a quick wish that whoever these guys were after would stay safe, however. She would not want to be hunted by men this dangerous. But at the end of the day, there was nothing she could do about it, and she had her own tasks. She wanted to get to Dover as soon as possible.

* * *

A loud horn screeched as the ferry came to a stop at the dock, and Hazel was one of the first ones hopping off the boat. Dodging around a few people, none of whom could see through her smoke, she walked away from the coast and into the city of Calais. She was in an entirely different country, lost among people who spoke a different language…

And aside from minor differences in the buildings, she could be excused for thinking she never left jolly old England. She might not be able to make heads or tails of the words they spoke or the signs hanging over the roads, but their thoughts still came thorugh loud and clear. All these people had the same worries and petty concerns as the random passerbys of Bristol or Greater Whinging.

She stepped off of the main roads and into a little alleyway, then with one jump—

—she sat on top of a building on the other side of the street. Morgan hopped off her shoulder onto the peaked roof, glancing around in surprise. She did not normally take him up to the kinds of places where he could fly on his own.

_Never thought you'd see another country, did you?_, she asked him. _Then again, I suppose from your perspective all countries are just the same. The only difference is whether there are a bunch of people around or not._

_Feel free to go exploring if you want._ She waved for him to take off. _I'll just be sitting here. I have a couple of things I want to try, then we'll look for someplace to stay for a while_.

Closing her eyes, she let the idle thoughts of the city wash over her. She had learned not a word of French in Little Whinging, and while she had made some efforts to rectify that in the last few days, she had hopes that she had figured out an easier way. If she listened to a bunch of people with her mind-reading for a while, would it be possible for her just to… absorb the local language? She had never tried anything like this, but she had never had reason to do so, either.

The thoughts of hundreds of people filled her head, the words losing all meaning and turning into an awful mishmash of nonsense. She was able to subject herself to only ten minutes of this before she shook her head and did whatever the telepathic equivalent of plugging up her own ears was.

That was not going to work.

Maybe it was just too many people all at once? Hazel rolled over onto her belly and closed her right eye so she could see better out of her left. One man stood out for being almost the same size around as Uncle Vernon and yelling at someone through a large brick of a mobile phone. She grimaced; she could easily remember her uncle being inordinately proud of his first mobile phone until one morning when he could not hear anything out of it except squealing. He had blamed her for it failing even though she knew she had rarely so much as looked at it, let alone tried to sabotage it. The way he was shouting, he was cut from much the same cloth.

She did not think learning French from somebody would take away their own knowledge of the language, but if it did… she might feel a little less guilty knowing she was muting Uncle Vernon's duplicate?

Blocking out the thoughts of everyone else as best as she could, she focused on him. "_How could Marguerite be this stupid?_" she heard as his thoughts came to her. "_The appointment was written right there on the calendar! I swear, if she wasn't so hot bent over my desk I would fire her right now_…"

A shudder ran through her at the brief glimpses of the mental images waiting for her just below the surface of his thoughts. This was why she did not try to focus on other people's thoughts like this, sometimes pictures slipped over along with words.

Grown-ups were _gross_.

More importantly, once again she could tell no difference between his thoughts and the thoughts of British people except for a light accent on the words. That was nice on the one hand; she would not have to worry about not being able to understand the people here. On the other, the easy way of learning French was right out.

Hazel sighed and patted the bag slung across her body. She had prepared for this, and that was why there was an English-to-French dictionary stowed away in her satchel thanks to the library in Bristol. She had no illusions of learning French in a week or two, but so long as she could understand what people said and pantomimed well enough, she should be able to get her meaning across while she learned some of the words.

Morgan had not left his previous spot and instead was just staring at her, so she pushed herself back up. _Don't want to leave me alone, do you_, she asked her friend. His only response was to hop onto her waiting palm, and she gently deposited him back on her shoulder. _Okay then. We can spend a day or two just looking at the sights, then we'll research where we can go that maybe has more answers for us than England did._

* * *

For the second time in the span of just a few days, Hazel heard a horn blast as she rode a vehicle. This was no ferry, though; it was a train. Specifically it was a train that ran on the route between Calais and a town called Compiègne. She knew nothing about the town itself, but what she had discovered from looking over maps of the country was that it was just outside a good-sized forest of the same name.

The forest was not as large as the Avesnois National Park near the border of Belgium, but what the maps seemed to show was that there were a number of towns scattered throughout the Park. Compiègne Forest did not have such a large human presence, which made it more attractive in her eyes. She had no idea if something like French druids had existed in the past or if that was a purely British tradition, but if they existed, a forest like this that had remained unsettled would be perfect for them. As such it was here that she would start her search.

Not to mention, Compiègne was a large enough town to get what she needed to survive, and if they did not have something, Paris was only a couple of days' walk.

The train was passing the edge of the forest now, so with a risky hop she teleported from her hiding spot at the juncture between a pair of train cars to the tree line. She gave the train a wave, even though she knew the conductor could not see her and likely would not have appreciated her stealing a ride if he could, and started walking deeper into the massive oaks. There was little chance she could make it all the way to the center of the forest, but her hope was to find a landmark as deep within as she could and teleport back first thing in the morning. It was a big forest, but with enough time she could search the entire thing.

On the plus side, she did not go to school anymore, which meant she had all the time in the world!

The sun had already been on its way down when she hopped onto the train, and soon enough the last rays of daylight were gone. Still she continued wandering, the darkness of the closely growing trees driven back only by her electric torch and what little light coming from the full moon overhead could break through the leaves. Branches creaked all around, and no matter how hard she ignored it she could not get rid of the feeling that she was being watched.

Another creak from behind her, and Hazel stopped to take a deep breath and chide herself. She had walked through plenty of little groves and patches of trees in the dark over the last few months, and besides being larger and foreign this forest was no different. She could leave now, returning to either the abandoned building in the outskirts of Calais she had used for the last couple of days or even somewhere in Britain and coming back when it was daylight again, but all the trees looked so much alike that she would have to jump back to the edge of the forest and start her search from square one. She had spent probably two hours walking around in here already, and that was progress she did not want to lose—

A loud howl came from her right, and her torch beam whipped over in that direction. _Okay, wolves were __**not**__ something I dealt with in England_, she admitted to herself. _Maybe heading back for the night and starting over first thing in the morning isn't the worst plan I've ever had._

The cracking of sticks came from the same direction as the howl and shifted from her side to in front of her. She kept the beam of light focused on the source of the sound, so she was able to see what finally stepped out from between the trees. The light landed squarely on it, and the splotch of brightness quivered and danced as her hand started shaking.

This was no wolf. It was something out of a nightmare.

The creature walked on all fours, but not like an animal. Its legs were too long and too thin, almost skeletal, and its back was twisted and hunched in order to keep its front paws on the ground. A couple of times its paws lifted off the ground entirely, almost as if it were trying to walk on two legs like a person. Ribs visibly poked out from its side and flexed with its heavy panting. Its skin was a sickly grey, and its hair was thin and sparse except where it had concentrated on the upper back, reaching up its neck to its head and the long ears on top. That head swung to look at her, the one part of the body that was at all similar to the wolf it sounded like, and it opened its mouth to let a pink tongue hang out among sharp yellowed teeth.

She swallowed thickly. Maybe it was like the hellhound in Wistman's Wood, scary-looking but not really dangerous? Maybe? _Nice doggy_, she told it, her empty hand rising in a warding gesture.

The monster stared at her for a moment longer, then it opened its mouth wide and _roared_.

And then it started running right at her.

* * *

**The reasoning Hazel went to France probably seems a little weak, but while the original plan made more sense, it was also needlessly dark. Morgan needs to LIVE, dammit!**

**And I know I said she would meet other characters, but I promise it's happening next chapter!**

**Silently Watches out.**


	12. Compiègne

**DadyCoool:** My original plan was for Hazel and Morgan to stumble upon a crooked Auror. I wasn't sure just what he would be doing, maybe buying or selling something from Mundungus Fletcher. At first he would try chasing her to Obliviate her because whatever he was doing was obviously magical, and then when he had to teleport after her he would get angrier about being led around by a child and one who's Muggleborn at that. Morgan would try to protect Hazel just like he did from the red cap, and a spell would slam him into a wall, leading him to die in Hazel's hands. So now I get to keep him alive _AND_ I don't have to make Hazel a killer because she didn't have to use a compulsion to make the Auror literally stop breathing until he died. Like I said, needlessly dark.

**YuukiAsuna-Chan:** Letting Hazel understand someone's thoughts regardless of the language they speak is an intentional choice, and one done for a couple of different reasons. First, she's going to be traveling for a bit, and dropping her off in the middle of a different country where people would have significant problems communicating with her would be… irritating, both as an author and I expect as a reader. Second and more in-character, considering Hazel relies on Legilimency as heavily as she does and has refined it to the point that she can correctly interpret the thoughts of animals (e.g., all the times she's interacted with Morgan), for her to be able to pull out the concepts behind another person's thoughts and correctly translate them is not unreasonable.

As for using a dictionary to translate, obviously that won't be enough by itself. You know that and I know that, but _Hazel_ hasn't figured it out yet. She is, after all, only nine years old. She does have a bit of an advantage though in that being able to understand "spoken" language and being mute herself means she can focus only on the written language, which helps cut down on just how much she needs to learn.

"**Bigoted wizards":** I realize this is partly my fault for choosing an intentionally confusing format, but keep in mind that what Hazel hears with her mind-reading is interwoven with characters' dialogues and italicized. Of the two Patrolmen who were tracking down the underage Apparationer, only the second one who spoke was racist. He wasn't saying "Mudblood" or plotting her Obliviation out loud where his partner could hear it.

* * *

_The monster stared at her for a moment longer, then it opened its mouth wide and _roared_._

_And then it started running right at her._

**Chapter 12  
****Compiègne**

Despite the danger and the long teeth coming towards her, Hazel's mind did not focus on this twisted creature. Instead a memory came to mind, a memory of another monster that had tried to kill her. It might have had a knife instead of long claws and been shorter than her rather than gigantic, but the red cap was no less dangerous to her than this monster was.

Maybe, she thought as she swung the beam from her torch away from her attacker, she could use the same strategy to keep herself safe.

By the time the monster was halfway to her, she was no longer there. Instead she sat in the crook of a tree where the trunk split into two thick branches. Morgan twittered at the sudden pressure and translocation, but she shushed him with a gentle pat. She had not left the forest; she had not even left the sight of the creature. She was now simply ten feet or so above above the ground. If it could jump this high, her torch had already found a branch on another tree that was twice as high as the two she sat upon.

And if it could climb, she was a short hop from Calais or anywhere she had been in England.

The monster skidded to a halt when it realized its quarry was suddenly missing, and it whirled around. Then it did so again and again, and she could almost imagine the confusion it was obviously feeling. Not once did it look up, still convinced that she was down below where she had been before. She was also getting… something from it. Not thoughts, not like a person, but not the vague emotions she felt like she was able to pick up in Morgan's song and behavior either. It was more like when a person was feeling an emotion so strongly she could almost feel a shadow of it as well.

This thing, whatever it was, was _angry_. Madder than she had ever felt from Uncle Vernon, even.

Another howl came from deeper in the woods, and with a snap and a snarl the creature took off running on all fours towards the sound. The obvious explanation for what she was dealing with hit her, and she slapped herself on the forehead for being so dumb. Was this a _werewolf_?! She looked up at the moon, and sure enough, it was full.

_I'll admit, I wasn't expecting to find actual, real life __**werewolves**__ when we came to France_, she told Morgan. _I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised, though. I mean, we already know that fairies and dragons are real, so why not werewolves? And it sounded like it isn't alone._

The real question in front of her was what the next step would be. This forest sounded like there were multiple werewolves within it, the exact number impossible to tell from where she sat. Wandering around on the ground did not sound like the smartest or safest strategy for staying uneaten, but this werewolf had not once looked at her despite her torch still shining bright. If she stayed up in the trees like she was, she should be safe. She could not guarantee it, but it seemed like it was likely.

Her other option was to come back after dawn. Werewolves had not been one of the subjects she had researched, but from what little she knew about them they only changed under the full moon. In the light of day, they should be normal people. She hoped so, anyway, but she would have to keep an eye out in case they could change at will or something.

_It wouldn't be __**too**__ risky for me to stay up here, would it_, she asked her friend. _I mean, worst case scenario we jump back to Calais for the night if they do start chasing us. There shouldn't be that much danger in just __**looking**__._

Decision made, she teleported from her current tree to the one she had been eyeing as her next step when running. That vantage point allowed her to find another tree that looked like it could bear her weight and was in the direction in which the werewolf had run, and she jumped to that one before finding a fourth tree. The recurrent howls of the wolves served as her guide, and she moved again and again, thirty or forty feet at a time, just following the sounds. She had to stop a couple of times to let the headache that was threatening to form settle down, but eventually her relatively straight line of travel let her catch up.

Hazel stopped and stared at what she saw below her. In the middle of the woods stood a clearing, but it was not empty. What had to be a dozen or more little huts or shacks were scattered throughout the space, some pushed against the edge of the tree line while others were placed proudly near the cluster of fire pits that marked the center. None of the buildings were tiny, not really, but from what she could see even the largest could probably be squeezed into the living room of Number 4 with only a little difficulty. More interesting to her were not the buildings, but the creatures who milled around between them and around the still-smoldering fires.

Werewolves. _Lots_ of werewolves.

She pressed herself more tightly against the tree to make sure she would not risk falling out and watched with wide eyes. It was hard to tell just how many of them there were down there, partly because they all looked more or less the same and partly because they kept moving around and snarling and clawing at one another. It did not look like an all-out brawl, not as far as she could tell. The closest comparison she had was one time when she saw a couple of dogs fighting, which involved a few bites before one of them backed off and ran away.

What was happening in front of her looked… kind of like that. The biggest difference was that none of them were running away so much as backing off and picking a fight with a different werewolf. Sometimes one would run off, normally followed by several others, but after just a few minutes most or all of them would find their way back. Surprisingly none of them were lashing out at the shacks, but then again buildings did not usually fight back, so maybe that had something to do with it.

She looked up at the sky again. The moon was not quite to its highest point, which likely meant it was not midnight yet and there was still plenty of time for the werewolves to frolic. Despite her sitting here watching them, none of them had yet to notice her. Was it because she was still hidden amongst the branches a couple of trees back from the actual tree line? She did not know, and no matter her curiosity this was something she was not all that eager to test.

_What do you think? Stick around for a couple of hours to watch some more, then jump back to town to get some sleep? This place is definitely unique enough I should be able to get back without any trouble_. Morgan had no answer for her, and she looked out the corner of her eye to find him fluffed up and sound asleep on her shoulder. She shook her head with a smile. _You are no help at all_.

* * *

Hazel's eyelids itched, and she rubbed them for a bit before blinking them open. The sun was just coming up, the first beams of dawn hitting her face and explaining why she was waking up now. She yawned and tried to stretch her arms, but as she moved she felt herself start leaning to the side and then fall backwards. She came free from whatever had been supporting her, and despite her arms desperately wheeling about for a second there was nothing around her but empty air.

Then something very strong hit her very hard in the back.

She lay on the ground just trying to catch her breath as Morgan scolded her overhead and memories came back to her no longer sleeping brain. She had been in a tree, presumably the one whose branches were stretched out above her. She had been in a tree because she was watching a pack of _werewolves_, and she had fallen asleep. And she had been in that tree all that time because she _really did not want to get eaten_!

Adrenaline surged through her veins. She rolled off her back to her feet, her legs curled up beneath her and just waiting to jump through space to somewhere – anywhere – safer than here. One growl, one flash of fang, and she would be gone.

Raising her head to look over a bush, she stared at the sight before her. It was obvious that werewolves could not remain transformed in the light of day. Grey skin was lightening into pink and tan, and the overlong limbs were receding into more normal proportions. The sparse hair on their necks and upper backs shifted and slid into place on the tops of their heads and changed back to human colors. Throughout the clearing were groaning moans and creaking bones as distorted anatomy shifted back into place.

After a couple of minutes it was over, and the clearing was filled with a bunch of naked people. Thankfully for her peace of mind none of the naked adults started doing anything gross, just started walking towards the different cottages with a few but not all hiding their private parts from view. They came back out a short time later in ones and twos, now dressed but not in normal clothes. Most of them were wearing either long shirts over trousers or colorful but not fluffy bathrobes.

Bathrobes that looked a lot like the ones the men she saw in front of the Greater Whinging library were wearing, now that she thought about it.

Hazel was more than just a little bit curious, and she started walking towards the little settlement now that more people were walking out of their huts. Interestingly, almost all of them were walking in the same direction away from the village, at a right angle to the path she was using to approach them. Where were they headed?

Her foot landed on a twig, and it snapped beneath her weight. The sound caught the attention of one of the men who was dressed in a homespun tunic. Their eyes met, and she sighed and raised one hand to wave towards him. It was not as if she planned on staying invisible, not when she had _so many_ questions to ask.

"_A child? What is a little kid doing this deep in the forest this early in the morning_?" His face suddenly paled, the blood rushing out even from the top of his bald head. He started talking in French, which she understood not a word of, but thankfully his thoughts continued to flow unhindered and intelligibly. "_H-Hello, little one. Please don't be bitten, please don't be bitten. What are you doing out here? She doesn't __**look**__ like we mauled her, so she should be okay, but…_"

Reaching into her satchel at her side, she pulled out a notebook and a pen. _"Bonjour,"_ she wrote, one of the very few words in French she knew before coming here. She thought for a moment about what to say next, but finally she decided that honesty was probably the best choice. She just hoped he could understand English because she did not yet know enough words to hold a real conversation with anybody. _"I was wandering around looking for signs of magic when I found this place."_

The man blinked at her writing and then looked more closely at her. "_English? What is an English girl doing out here of all places? Now I am glad my mother insisted I spend my time learning other languages. But what does she mean, 'signs of magic'? That would mean… Is she a _Né-Moldus_? How would an English _Né-Moldus_ even get here?"_

This time it was her turn to blink. 'Nemoldoose'? What in the world did that mean?

"Hello," he said again, though this time in English with a thick accent. "You have better… _What is the word?_ …fortune if you go to Paris. Where was— _no, that is not it_ – is your… families?"

She was already scribbling something else down, and before he could continue muddling through she held up her note. _"I can understand you when you speak French. I just can't write it yet. What's in Paris?"_

"_Oh, thank the Circles. I was not looking forward to having to talk to her in a foreign language. At least with writing I can take my time translating. _Paris is where most of the wizards are," he continued, though his mouth was again babbling in French. "Where the main business areas are, and the shops, and the government. I am surprised you made it out here without stopping there first."

Most of the wizards? Business areas? _Government_?! All Hazel could do was stare at him for several long moments. When she thought she would find living mages, she was expecting maybe a few families living near each other on land passed down for generations, training themselves and experimenting away from prying eyes. That was the easiest explanation for why stories of magic died out hundreds of years ago. If this man was to be believed, and she could see no reason why he would lie to her, then there were not a few select families of sorcerers.

There was an entire society that had somehow escaped notice, possibly for centuries. Somehow in the course of four months, she had completely missed them in England. Were they only in London, a city where she had never gone? Was it _her_ those two men in the capes and robes had been looking for?

Why, if her parents lived in this separate society, was she kicked out when they died?

"_Dear me, where are my manners?_ My name is Jean Luc, by the way," he continued, offering his hand to her. She numbly put her own in his to be shaken with a soft pat at the end. "What might yours be?"

"_Hazel,"_ she eventually wrote.

"A pleasure to meet you. _Why is she writing everything down?"_ he then asked himself before his eyes cut back to her book and then to her mouth. "_Unless she cannot speak, perhaps? It would be strange for that to be the case, but I cannot think of any other obvious reason why. It is not as if it is a fear of interacting with strangers, or she would not have walked up to us._ Are you alright, little one?"

His question shook her from her thoughts, though calling them that might be overly generous. Numb stupefaction would be more accurate. _Right. Information first, be shocked at how wrong I was later._ She gave him a nod and started writing again. A few times she crossed a word or a line off, but eventually she turned it around to show him. _"I had not heard anything about a magical culture in Paris. Or anywhere for that matter. Do you think there is something like it in England? Why do all of you live out here instead of there? Do werewolves like living in nature better? Where did everybody go just now?"_

A hundred more questions had bubbled up as she was writing these down, but she held back. Maybe if she could speak it would be easier to ask about everything she wanted to know, but whenever she had tried doing so in writing before, the person she was asking had gotten a glazed look in their eyes and quickly made their escape. Smaller chunks were better.

"_That is a lot of writing_. I do not know anything about English wizards," he told her, "except that they exist. If you wanted to go looking, I would start looking in London, but I know nothing more than that." She nodded along; that made sense, she supposed. He licked his lips nervously. "_How does she already know we are werewolves? And why is she so calm about it?! I thought even Moldus knew about us and would want to run away_. You are right. We are werewolves. We do not live in Paris because, well, we are not exactly welcomed there. Wizards are afraid of us, not without good reason. _That they leave us alone here is miraculous on its own._ My friends have left to go to work. _Sadly the same jobs that will take us would be quick to fire us should anyone show up late, and being in pain after a full moon is not considered a valid excuse to take the day off._"

Jobs, ugh. When she grew up, she promised herself she was not going to have a job. She was going to just learn everything she could about magic. It sounded like a much more interesting life. All she had to do was figure out how to live without stealing food all the time.

Still, she could not help but wonder what kind of jobs a werewolf would have. Did they do something that needed a lot of physical strength? She had always thought werewolves were supposed to be super strong and had great senses. Or maybe they used those senses to be investigators and detectives? That would be kind of wicked, actually.

Jean Luc shook his head when he saw her questions written down. "_If only that was the case_. We take what jobs we can find, _what jobs they will let us take. Menial work. Gisèle probably has the best job of any of us, and she had to go to the non-magical world even to find it. At least her boss does not exploit her overmuch because she does not have any of the documents Moldus carry around._"

That last bit did not make much sense to her, so she ignored it in favor of the part in the middle. _"Why can't you get good jobs?"_

"We do not have wands or formal education. Most of us, anyway, _and the government is perfectly happy keeping us unread and stupid. It is not enough that we are cursed already, they need to make things harder_."

She scowled at his last thought. That sounded too much like the attitude Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia had towards her. If it were not for the law telling them they had to send her to school, they probably would have kept her in her cupboard forever except to do chores. _"Then why not make wands? Or learn to do magic without them?"_ That should not be too much of a burden. In just a few months, she had learned to do so much; surely they could learn to do anything they needed over the course of years.

The laugh Jean Luc let out was faintly mocking and very bitter. "I wish it were that simple, little Hazel. _To see the world as a child again_. _If it were that easy, it would not be such an obstacle_. Magic is impossible without a wand, and the way of wandlore and wandmaking is a rare and complex skill."

Hazel's lips curled into a frown. Magic was impossible without a wand? That did not sound right. Not right at all. She was living proof that wands were not necessary, as was her mother. Aunt Petunia's memories of her mum and all the magic her mum had done made that fact clear.

_Then again, the stones of Shervage showed two different groups of magic users. One of them had wands. Those must have been the wizards he is talking about. But the others…_ She wrote another question. _"Do wizards use staves too, or just wands?"_

"Staves? You mean like a walking stick or something? No. Not that I've ever heard of, anyway."

She nodded, already back deep in thought. Wizards used wands, not staves. So who were the men and women on the Shervage stones who held a staff in their hands? Those must be the druids. Wizards needed wands to do any magic. She and her mother did not, so they could not be wizards. Therefore they had to be druids. It was just logical.

_Maybe Mum wasn't part of the wizard's society at all. That would explain why she left me with her sister when she and Dad died. She didn't have any magic friends to give me to. Maybe there was no one else who could take me, and she thought Aunt Petunia would still be a better choice than sending me to an orphanage even with all their fights. Considering the things Uncle Vernon said and thought about them, that isn't terribly surprising_.

"I have my own question," Jean Luc said, pulling her away from her conclusions. "Where are your parents? I'm sure they're worried that you've gone and wandered off. _How long has she been missing, I wonder? They have to be just absolutely beside themselves with fear._"

"_I don't have any family. They're all gone."_ Which was close enough to the truth. _"I'm a wanderer."_

"Oh." He looked at her with rising sympathy. "I… _should really take her to Paris. They can make sure she gets back home to England. Or at least find her a foster family here. The Republican Guards already have their eyes on us, though, and if she is seen in the company of a couple of werewolves, they will assume we are trying to kidnap her. Werewolves are guilty until proven innocent. I cannot just drop her off and leave her there either. What to do?"_

Her pen was already writing, and she soon held up her notebook. _"If you're thinking about dropping me off somewhere, I'll just slip away and go back to wandering. I go where I want. But if you're scared about me being HERE, I can move on. Thank you for all the information."_

"No, _that would be even worse_," he said with a shake of his head. "You can stick around here for a while. _That will give me more time to figure out what to do with her_. _If she goes off on her own, she might wander into something that is even less friendly like a vampire or a hag or just the kind of people who would prey on a little girl on her own._ I'm sure we can find something to do to keep you from getting bored."

* * *

**Supposedly the French term for Muggle is "non-magique", which feels incredibly phoned in like somebody didn't want to spend more than 5 seconds thinking about it. Instead the werewolves and other French wizards will use the term "Moldu", which is the word used in the French translation of the books, and will call Muggleborns "Desmoldus" meaning "from Muggles" because I couldn't find a good source for what word was actually used.**

**EDIT:** Many thanks to reviewer **valtarius** for telling me that the word for Muggleborns used in the French books is "Nées-Moldus", from which I can only presume the singular is "Né-Moldus". Which… seems like it's probably pronounced the same? I guess? I took Spanish and Latin in high school, not French, okay?!

**Silently Watches out.**


	13. How Does Wizard Work?

**A thought that has been brewing in my head for a while, but I wish FFN had some way to let me acknowledge your reviews besides replying to them like SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity do. There have been a number of reviews that raised valid questions or made comments I just enjoyed, but I can't SAY anything without ruining surprises down the line.**

**Also, thank you to everyone who pitched in with explanations of French grammar. I do appreciate it, even if that is a sentence I never thought I would have to write.**

**Gremlin Jack:** A lot of fanfics treat the werewolf transformation as a one night event because _canon_ treats it as such. If you look back at book 3, Lupin transformed the night that he and Sirius revealed everything to Harry and co., and the very next day he was back in human form packing his belongings up. As the phrasing he uses about his transformations is that he changes "once a month", that would imply that he doesn't change back and forth for three days but only changes for one night.

"**I thought France would be more open minded than Britain":** In general, France is more open to non-human beings than Britain is. They are certainly more welcoming to Veela and vampires, and **London Knight**'s comment about how a half-giant could never become the headmistress of Hogwarts is spot on. Werewolves _specifically_ are distrusted, however, thanks to a spate of attacks committed by a group of werewolves in the mid-eighteenth century, which the Muggles still remember and attribute to the "Beast of Gevaudan". Considering this nearly wrecked the Statute of Secrecy not even a hundred years after it was signed, the French government has little to no mercy for any crimes – even _potential_ crimes – committed by a werewolf.

Whether _Hazel_ ever learns this is very much up in the air, but it was part of my behind the scenes world-building.

**One more comment before we get to the main chapter. I have a scene in mind that I'm going to do my best to release on Halloween proper. Whether there will be another chapter between now and then depends on how quickly I can write.**

* * *

**Chapter 13  
****How Does Wizard Work?**

Jean Luc turned his head from one side to the other, and Hazel had to hold back a smile when she heard his next thought. "_This would have been much easier if everybody had not already run off. What am I going to do to keep her occupied? Who is still here… Ah ha!_ Grégorie! Mind helping me out for a minute? _He knows a little English, which is better than most. Hopefully it will be enough to muddle through since she can't talk back to us in a sensible language._"

She frowned. She was by no means fluent, but she knew some French! A little bit, anyway. …She had tried to learn a few of the common words and phrases that were in the back of her dictionary. It was not great, she knew that, but she had thought it would be enough to cover the basics while she looked in her book to find the words she wanted.

She also thought there would be more people who could read English, she admitted guiltily to herself. She expected she might need to do charades to get her point across from time to time, but she had not thought it would be a _frequent_ problem.

Of course, neither had she expected to run into a pack of werewolves who knew all about a magical society within a week.

There were only a few people this Grégorie chap could be, but she was still surprised when it turned out to be a scruffy-looking older man with brown hair turned almost entirely grey and a slight limp in his left leg. "Where is the fire, Jean Luc— _A girl? What in the world is she doing in the middle of this forest right after a full moon?_ Making a new friend, are you?"

Jean Luc sighed and ran one hand over his bald head. "Something like that. This is Hazel. Seems she is a Née-Moldus who managed to stumble on us in the middle of the night. She was not bitten!" he said when Grégorie's eyes immediately jumped to her, horror peering out of them. "_Not that it was not the first thought on my mind as well_. Since she is already here, I was hoping you could take her with you and show her around. She says she understands French, but she is illiterate and can only write in English. _I know it sounds crazy, do not give me that look_. I will fill you in on the details later tonight," he added at the flat expression Grégorie shot him.

"_The woods are no place for a little girl. Nor are we_. And what are you going to be doing while we are wandering the woods?"

"I still need to finish the budget for next month, _and now account for another mouth to feed_. It is boring enough for me to do. Forcing somebody to watch me do it could only be worse. _I also need to take some time to decide what options I have for the long term. If she really has no one like she says, I might not have any other choice but to take her to Paris so they can stick her with some family or another_."

A small smile flickered over her face. Jean Luc, as deep in this thoughts as he was, could not see it, but Grégorie wore a small frown of confusion. "_What could she find funny about accounting_?" he wondered quietly.

It was not the the budget she found funny though. It was the assumption that she would go along with any plan that involved 'sticking' her anywhere she did not want to go. She could teleport! A hundred kilometers or more were nothing to her, and that meant she would never be caged again, especially not with people who did not care about her. Not like the Dursleys had done to her for years and years and years.

She was free to wander to her heart's content.

Grégorie sighed quietly and waved for her to follow along with her. "_This is a terrible idea._ I guess you should come along with me. If you plan to stay here for a time, I might as well show you our little sliver of paradise. _I wish that were true_."

Walking in his wake, she held her notebook under one arm and pulled her French dictionary from her satchel. A tiny weight dropped onto her shoulder, and she spared a look at Morgan before returning her attention to the path Grégorie walked and the words on the page. She took a minute to find all the words she wanted, but soon she had a simple sentence written out in French this time. Her steps quickened, and she tapped his elbow to get his attention and show him her message.

'_I can leave if you do not want me here.'_

"_What does that mean…?_ No, it is nothing like that," he said after a moment. "It is… You know what we are, no?" She nodded. "_And you want to stay anyway?_ We are not safe for little girls to be around. _Nobody, really_. You would be better off with other people who are not so dangerous. _Although maybe she should stay, if only so we can teach her how verbs work. How could she understand what we are saying if she does not know that, I wonder._"

She blinked in confusion at that last thought and quickly shook her head. That was… not unimportant, necessarily, but certainly not the most important thing this instant. Some more searching, and she carefully copied the words from dictionary to notepad. _'You do not scare me.'_

Fragments of thought whirled through his head for a couple of seconds, then he shook his head. "_We should_." He started walking away again.

Another tap, and he looked at the pad again. _'Where do we go?'_ was the best way she could figure out what she wanted to ask, and she cast a glare at the book in her hands. How a dictionary of all things, especially one as thick as three fingers, could not have the words 'are' or 'going' in it, she hadn't a clue.

Still, he seemed to parse out what she was asking. "Whenever we are transformed _into monsters_, there is a strong chance that we happened to kill something, _some innocent creature_. I tend to walk through the woods and check to see if that is the case. We tend to kill one or two deer a month, sometimes something bigger. When I find them, I bring the bodies back to butcher. _Ha! Squeamish, are you?"_ he added when he saw her grimace. "It is not pretty, but better to cook the meat and tan the hide than to leave it all to rot. _Keeps the smell down, too_."

'_The whole forest belong to the pack?'_

"_I hate that word_. We do not call ourselves a 'pack'," he told her with just a trace of heat in his voice. "We are people, not animals. We are a commune, a family. Not a pack." Before she could finish the French word for 'sorry', he was already waving her off. "I know you did not know that. _The wizards we have to deal with do not appear to know it either, no matter that we have told them a thousand times before_. I am just telling you that for the future.

"But to answer your question, no. This is a large forest, and most of it belongs to the Moldus. We live on a portion of it that my family had enchanted so Moldus cannot see it."

Now she had to ask about the word that seemed to keep coming up again and again. _'Moldus?'_

"Moldus are people who do not have magic. That describes most of the people you have met, I expect," he said with a small, knowing smile. "Jean Luc said you were a Née-Moldus. That means you have magic, you are a wizard, but instead of being born to other wizards like we were you were born to parents without magic."

Hazel frowned and thought about it. She was not, not with her mother being a druid too, but Aunt Petunia's behavior did not make any sense if her own mother was magical as well. Maybe her mum was one of these Née-Moldus people? _'More or less,'_ she finally replied. _'You say your family own this land?'_

"I do, now. I was bitten as a child _like too many of us were_, and my father wanted to give me the best life I could have. _It was not as if I could ever go to school being like this_. He and one of his old school friends, _one of the only ones who did not desert him because he refused to throw me out_, taught me all about hunting and tracking and everything else I would need to know to live on my own. He also had someone put a spell on the edges of the land so I could not leave on the full moon when I changed. I invited some of the other werewolves I knew to come live here as well since that spell means we can not hurt anyone. That is how our commune got started. When he died, he left the land to me. _And I know he gave me more so we would not have to live on nothing, but we will never see a single coin with Violette's husband being such a greedy bastard_."

Grégorie stomped away faster, his thoughts turning ever more grumbling, and she hurried to keep up. Only once the furious thoughts directed at whoever this Violette – a sister, maybe? – and her husband were had calmed did she rush forwards a little to walk beside him so she could show him her notepad without constantly tapping him. _'You do not go to school? Why? Where do you learn magic if not school? Teach yourself?'_

A hand came down to pat her gently on the head, and he gave her a sad smile. "_I think I see why Jean Luc wants to keep you, now. When was the last time we had somebody so innocent around here?_ Werewolves are not allowed to go to any school in France. There is too much of a risk of us biting another child and giving them this curse. There also are not enough of us to warrant a school all our own, _assuming the government would let us have one even if there were more of us_. That also means that most of us do not know any magic. Jean Luc reads a lot and taught himself some spells, and Marcel, who you have not met yet, attended a magic school until he and a friend of his were bitten. They were expelled. Elise used to have a wand, but it was broken years ago. The rest of us do not really know anything about magic. A few potions are as close to magic as we get."

Potions?! Hazel stared at him in shock and a little rising dismay. They could make magic potions? Those appeared in all sorts of stories and folktales. What did he mean, that was not magic?!

Shaking her head at the surprising attitude, she asked the question that had come to mind before he distracted her. _'Why Elise not buy another?'_

He grimaced. "Wands are expensive. They are meant to last a wizard his whole life. We do not have a lot of money to throw around, and definitely not enough to buy a wand for everybody. _Not like a wand would do any of us much good without knowing how to use it. Why did Marcel not pay more attention to his lessons when he went to Beauxbatons?_ The rest of us have to live without."

Hazel's heart felt like it was breaking as she listened to the resignation in his voice, and she could not help but think how lucky she was to be born a druid instead of a wizard. The idea of not being able to do any magic without a wand was bad enough, but then to be unable to get one? To have this amazing gift dangled in front of her face her entire life but never being able to reach out and grab it? That was terrible.

She sucked in her bottom lip as she thought furiously. She was not proud of it, but she had become adept at stealing. It was easy when she could make everybody ignore her and when she could pick pockets with a hand that was not really there. She had benefited from it immensely. Maybe… maybe it was time those skills were used to benefit people besides herself. Her pen scribbled on the pad, and she turned it around.

'_Where do you find a wand store?'_

"Eager, are you?" he said with a laugh. "You are not old enough to get a wand. You have to be eleven or turning eleven and getting ready to go to school. It will be a few years yet. _I hope by then we have someone who can take you in so you get to use that curious brain of yours_. I am sorry if that is a disappointment."

'_Okay. But for the future, where?'_

"_Persistent little girl, aren't you_?" He shrugged. "Place Cachée would be the place to go. That is where all the magical shops are in Paris. I am sure somebody can show you the way when you are older, _or maybe Lucien can take her there one day just to show her around. If she was raised by Moldus, I am sure it would be a sight to see_."

Place Cachée. Place Cachée. She focused on the foreign words, trying to burn them into her mind. She could head out tonight to Paris and start looking around for such a place. Or, she realized, maybe some of those bad jobs Jean Luc said these people had were located in this same location.

It was worth a try.

"Come along," he told her with a wave, his indulgent smile revealing that he had no idea of her intentions. "We are wasting daylight, and we have not even started looking. The deer we killed last night are not going to drag themselves to us."

* * *

For the second day in a row, Hazel awoke to the sun shining in her face. This time, however, it was intentional, and she rubbed the sleep from her eyes and pushed herself upright. Her movements were careful because this time she remembered that she was lying on a precarious perch. Not a tree limb today, but instead the gently sloped roof atop one of the cottages in Jean Luc and Grégorie's commune.

She needed to wake up before anyone else to be sure that her plan would succeed.

The previous evening, the werewolves who worked had all returned to this little village and had been surprised by the mute girl hanging around in their midst. It meant a night full of introductions, the majority of which Hazel was not sure she would be able to remember. There were too many names, too many questions posed, too many little facts given to her, for her possibly to keep straight.

And yet for all that it was overwhelming, for all that several of them were scared to have her around, not a single one had turned her away. Their near-immediate acceptance had only strengthened her resolved, and while she might not be able to remember all their names and where they were from, she could keep track of their numbers.

Fourteen. Aside from Jean Luc and Marcel, there were fourteen werewolves here who had been denied their magic. She could fix that.

Sounds began coming from the various small houses as the sun fully breached the horizon. She waited and waited, and just like the day before, a handful of men and women started a tired slog northwards. Breathing out her ignore-me smoke to be on the safe side – although with how worn down they all looked, she might be able to follow without its help and still remain unseen – she and Morgan slid off the roof to the ground and slipped into the trees.

The walk served to wake the adults up, and she made sure to stay behind and to their left as they trudged along a path through the trees. The dirt beneath them was packed down hard from the constant passage of feet walking the same route day after day, month after month. She danced through the tree line, dodging small shrubs lurking in the shade of the larger trees and knotty roots that broke through the ground. After fifteen minutes of walking, they reached a small gravel road that cut into the forest, coming from she knew not where and returning to the same destination. One of the women at the front of the group reached into a small purse hanging from her wrist and pulled out something small and slightly shiny.

It looked like a coin.

She raised the coin above her head, and Hazel watched with burning curiosity. What was it for? Would it create a portal to their destination? Turn into a giant eagle? Just instantly teleport them all elsewhere?

On the other side of the group from her, the road started to _stretch_. It was as if the bend in the road she could see in the distance was moving farther and farther away, and as it did a shape started to form, one formed of grey shadows and empty. The shape gained substance, and Hazel could only stare as a carriage drawn by eight horses sped its way towards the group before slowing down to a stop in front of them.

The werewolves started climbing into the enormous carriage, but Hazel's eyes were fixed on the horses. Mostly because they were _not_ horses, or not living ones anyway. Instead of skin and fur, they had plates of a bluish metal that flexed and shifted in a rhythmic pattern almost as though they were breathing in truth. In the gaps between the plates she could see innumerable gears spinning and ticking in an intricate dance. As those gears moved, the horses shifted and pawed at the ground in a strange synchrony.

They were undoubtedly not as warm and cuddly as living ponies would be, but there was still an elegance to them that was fascinating to watch in action.

The two clockwork horses in front reared up in unison, as they came down the two behind them started rising as well in the exact same manner. The action rippled through the team, and the carriage started rolling forwards. Her eyes grew wide as she realized she had missed her chance to sneak into the carriage, which left her with few options. Before the carriage could move too far, she jumped—

—onto its roof and pressed herself flat. _I really hope this doesn't puff into smoke or something and leave me here_, she told Morgan.

The horses and the carriage behind them picked up speed, and soon enough everything twisted and warped. Lying on her belly as she was, she thankfully did not fall through and land on the ground. Instead she was able to watch with amazement as the world around her smeared and swirled just like a painting she had to do in class one day after Dudley dumped a cup of water on it. She was hit with a blast of vertigo as everything seemed to tilt and then fold onto itself. Before the nausea could get too bad, all the tilting and swirling and smearing reversed itself, and the world snapped back into place.

She was no longer in a forest. Instead the carriage was stopped in a large cobbled square with streets running outwards at right angles to each other in all four directions. At the corners of the square between the streets stood large bronze braziers, and while she watched one flared up with bright green flames only to disgorge a man in a dark grey robe carrying a briefcase. She looked around, and sure enough just about everybody in sight was likewise wearing robes or else tunics over either trousers or long skirts. There were a few exceptions, mostly a few teenagers she could see here and there wearing normal clothes, but very few indeed.

People started climbing out of the carriage and walking towards one of the four streets. And more people, and more people, far more than this carriage could have possibly held even if everyone was sitting in somebody else's lap. Was it like her satchel, she wondered as her hand moved to pat the bag in question, lots bigger on the inside than on the outside? That certainly would explain what she was seeing, and there were maybe a couple of stories she had read where the wizard's home was bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside.

Another brazier flared, and with a quick hop she was beside the green fire and behind the woman who stepped down out of the pan onto the stone floor. A long blow to wrap herself in her smoke again, and she started walking down one of the streets at random and looking around her in amazement. Over there was a store with a tall stack of cauldrons flanking both sides of the door. Next to her was a store with jars of animal parts floating in oddly colored liquids and barrels. Farther up the street was a building whose sign changed colors every second or two next to a building where the mannequins in the window turned and posed for the passersby to see the robes they wore in the best possible light. In the sky above her flew flocks of owls, all of them entering and leaving different shops before flapping away, and at the sight of them Morgan squeaked and pressed tightly against her neck for safety.

What did wizards do with their time, she thought as she started listening to the surrounding crowd. Did most of them work, and if so, what jobs did they have? Did they push the boundaries of what was possible? Were there magical creatures like dragons or demons running around that they spent all day wrangling, and they had gotten so good at it that _that_ was the reason nobody who was not magic knew about them? Or maybe, now that she was thinking about all the things she had seen in the last few months, were they out exploring new realms and alternate realities like those where the fae dwelled?

Several boys ran over to a window, one of them waving to a few others. "Look, look! Tinnamack just released a new broom! It's supposed to be faster than anything coming out of Britain nowadays!"

"Two sous per bat spleen?" an older woman yelled from inside a store, her voice coming through clearly despite the closed door. "That is highway robbery!"

"Did you see the new poster of Mathieu la Noir in _Musique Magique_? He makes me want to drink _him_ dry," a teenage girl said to several of her friends before all of them burst out giggling.

"Sulliman needs to learn to wait," one man said to a harried-looking and pimply teenage clerk. "I can only brew so much at a time, and he isn't my only customer!"

Hazel's eyes bounced back and forth over everything around her, but the longer she walked, the more her smile faded until it was a small, thoughtful frown. This place, these wizards, were… not what she expected.

They had magic. They sequestered themselves from normal people. They had shiny cauldrons and strange smells wafting about. And yet despite all that, if she closed her eyes, she could all too easily imagine herself back in Bristol during the two weeks she spent in that city. The words these wizards used might be different, but what they were saying was exactly the same.

Morgan twittered at her in confusion and concern, and she shook her head. _I'm fine, just got my hopes up for no reason. I thought these wizards would be like the ones from the books I read, where they spent all day doing research or guiding hobbits and boy heroes or tricking dragons out of their gold. They aren't. They're just regular people like everybody else._

_Let's keep moving. There is all this magic stuff everywhere. It can't be that hard to find a wand store where we can do some 'shopping'_.

As the sun rose in the sky, the air grew warmer and warmer. The stones of the street became hot to the touch. Finally Hazel could take it no longer and slid down one wall to the ground, sweat dripping down her face and the sleeves of the thinnest shirt she owned pulled up as far as they could go.

_Today is the worst_, she complained to Morgan, who unlike her appeared to have no issues with the heat. She suspected it was because nobody would look at him oddly for flying around with no clothes on. With how hot it was getting, she was sorely tempted to do the same and hope her ignore-me smoke kept people from noticing that she was naked.

Pulling a plastic water bottle out of her satchel, she took several gulps and grimaced at how warm it too had gotten. Not that it had been truly cold when she last filled the bottle. That was the downside of filling a bottle from a sink rather than giving in to temptation and stealing refrigerated bottles of water from stores. This way, she only had to steal once.

She snorted. At the rate she was going, she expected she would not be doing any thieving at all. She had wandered around what had to be the entire shopping district, ducking in and out of nearly every story, but despite hours of effort she had not been able to find one single store that had wands on display. That was the sole reason she had come here, to find the wand store and bring some back for the werewolves, but she could not find it! It was incredibly frustrating.

About the only thing as frustrating as that was the one store she could not figure out the purpose of. It had been on the end of one of the streets, but its sign was blurry in a way that did not clear up no matter how she looked at it or how much she blinked, and the door and windows were completely blackened out. When she tried to go inside, the door was sealed shut, and despite several tries her skeleton key spell could not to unlock it. She had been seriously tempted just to break one of the windows and walk in, especially since she still harbored a suspicion that this was the wand store she was looking for, but she had no confidence in her smoke's ability to hide her if she did that. Nor, honestly, did she think she could get in, make sure it sold wands, stuff fourteen wands into her bag, and jump out before somebody caught her and cast a spell on her.

She was too young to go to jail.

Even the visit to a magical bookstore had been a bust! Out of all the books stacked floor to ceiling, there was not a single one she could find that was in English. That a bookstore in France would only sell books in French was not a complete surprise, of course it wasn't, but that did not mean she was happy about it. Trying to translate even one book with just her dictionary would take forever, and while she could ask one of the werewolves to read it out loud for her, or even just read it to themselves so she could overhear their thoughts, adults always said that stealing was wrong. She doubted they would want to be involved in her reading her way through the bookstore, especially if they could not benefit from the books because they did not have wands with which to cast any spells of their own.

_This bites_, she thought with a sigh. _But maybe it isn't as bad as it could be. Grégorie said I would be going to magic school when I turn eleven, so while it's over a year away, that's a year where I can learn whatever I want. I've come a long way just in the last six months, and now I have something more than my own guesses. I could learn how to make potions from the group and just putter around seeing what is here to be seen. It isn't like I have a deadline when I have to have learned such-and-such. I can do whatever I like._

_All else fails, I have a year to get really good at reading French so I can read these books on my own if I get bored._ A frown crossed her face. _Or just in general. For all I know, if I stay here I'll have to apply to that French school Marcel went to, which means I __**really**__ need to learn how to read and write._

She nodded firmly at that thought. It was not as if she planned to stop learning, after all. She would just keep learning what she could. From the way Jean Luc and Grégorie had talked about what she had to look forward to as a Née-Moldus, she could guess that she was not expected to know much of anything before starting school. Whatever she learned in the meantime was a plus, not her catching up.

Taking another few sips of water, she poured a small amount into her cupped palm and held it up so Morgan could drink as well. _So we don't have anything to do here anymore. I guess we should head back to the forest, shouldn't we? At least it won't be as hot over there._

Morgan looked up from the water and tilted his head. With a chirp, he hopped from her arm to her sweaty hair and screeched before flying away. She climbed to her feet and started following, and then she caught sight of the store he was flying towards and sighed.

_Blast it all, it's like the pet store all over again_.

* * *

Hazel's feet landed in the soft dirt of the forest, and she stretched with a resigned smile on her face. _Yes, dear, you were right_, she told Morgan, who was perched securely on what little cloth now covered her shoulder. _I'm not listening to you about everything though, so don't let it go to your feathered head_.

The flap covering the doorway of one of the cottages flew open, and Jean Luc stepped out only for his eyes to immediately fall on her. "There you are! We have been looking all over for you all morning! _For all we knew, you had been eaten or kidnapped or something._ You scared Grégorie and me half to death—" He blinked when he saw her new outfit. "_She for sure was not wearing anything like that yesterday_. Where did you go?"

She needed to search in her satchel for her notepad as it had slipped down deeper into her pile of stuff, but soon enough she pulled it out. _'I caught a ride to Paris. Wanted to see what it was like, and I needed more summery clothes. What do you think?'_ She accentuated the question with a brief twirl.

When Morgan took off from her disgusting sweaty hair, he had immediately flown towards the nearest clothing store. A store that happened to be stocked with light clothing appropriate for a French summer. Her jeans and her long-sleeved shirts went back into her bag, as did a couple of pairs of white linen trousers, two skirts, and several tunic-like tops that had extremely short or no sleeves at all. _She_ had wanted to leave it at that, but Morgan refused to leave the store until she took the light blue sundress with a yellow ribbon around the waist that he had remained stubbornly perched upon, which she was currently wearing much to his delight.

"_What has my life become that a little girl is asking me for fashion advice_?" Jean Luc covered his face with one hand and dragged it down. "It looks fine. Wait," he continued, his hand dropping to show a confused expression, "how did you get back here?"

'_Jumped.'_

"_That tells me nothing_. What do you mean, 'jumped'?"

She teleported five feet to the side then back to where she had been standing, and she pointed at her previous answer.

"You can teleport." She nodded happily, but he just kept staring at her. "_She is a little kid. How in the world can she __**teleport**__ already? That is not a skill she should be capable of until she is practically an adult!"_ He took a deep breath. "That's – _terrifying_ – nice, Hazel. Do not do that too much. It can be bad for you. _How she can do that without leaving bits and pieces of herself all over the country, I do not know and do not __**want**__ to know. I just hope she quits. I do not know any spells to put her back together if she makes a mistake_. And since you are back, you can help us with making dinner.

"_Meanwhile, I need a drink._"

* * *

**Hazel really needs to get a book on French soon so I can quit writing sentences that are so grammatically incorrect. It makes proofreading just painful. (For anyone who doesn't get it, she only has a dictionary so doesn't know how to conjugate French verbs. All the verbs she is writing are in their base infinitive, "to blank" form. Maybe it just made more sense in my head. *blush*)**

**How expensive are wands? Canon is nonsensical or at least inconsistent because on the one hand we have Harry buying his wand for 7 galleons and Rowling saying that a galleon is worth 5 pounds, so it's only 35 pounds each; on the other hand, that was too much for the Weasleys to buy Ron his own wand until they won a sweepstakes despite that being **_**literally the most important possession a wizard has**_**. Not to mention that with how rarely people should need to replace their wands, I highly doubt Ollivander could make a living off his business because he would be looking at an income no more than £2.100 (roughly $4,200) PER YEAR. Even if we assume there are other schools whose students also get their wands from Ollivander, it is unlikely that there are another couple of thousand students lining up to buy a wand.**

**I normally handwave how much a galleon is worth and make it more valuable to explain the strange pricing found in canon, but while I was planning this chapter another potential explanation came to mind. Considering Harry was chosen by a wand that was the brother to Voldemort's and is made of holly, the wood that per Pottermore is inclined towards people "engaged in dangerous quests", Ollivander may have given him the wand at a significant discount as his version of "It's dangerous to go alone. Take this". The 7 galleon cost would therefore be specific to Harry when in truth he normally charges much more.**

**Silently Watches out.**


	14. Misadventure

**WillItWork:** Hazel is definitely my favorite character to write since I finished the Black Queen saga, and may actually be as fun to write as Jen despite them being polar opposites in basically every way. I would actually love to throw them into a story together once Hazel gets older (post-Triwizard, maybe?) and just watch the fireworks. Or at least watch them become the most dysfunctional buddy cop pair _ever_.

**navatr1x:** Per Pottermore at least, werewolves are almost always wizards/witches because Muggles don't survive the initial mauling. Considering in canon wizards have a game than includes self-directed cannonballs flying around and don't get pulped, I'm willing to go with that explanation. That means the reason Jean Luc's people can't get jobs in the non-magical world has nothing to do with discrimination or magical laws but because they are wizards born in the Wizarding World and consequently do not have _Muggle documentation_. Like, say, birth certificates or school records. If they tried to get Muggle jobs, they would be seen as undocumented aliens, which severely limits what jobs are open to them.

**Bountyhunter1977:** Hazel wouldn't find any French books about the Girl-Who-Lived. Mostly because the French don't care. Unlike Grindelwald, Voldemort was a purely British problem; he was leading one side of a _civil war_, not trying to conquer all of Europe. Are there French wizards who know about her? Sure, most of them British ex-pats or those involved with the ICW who were worried about him breaking the Statute of Secrecy. But the average wizard on the street in France or Spain or anywhere else in Europe? "Hazel Potter" means nothing to them.

* * *

**Chapter 14  
****Misadventure**

Hazel slept in for a short time the following day, opening her eyes only after the sun had fully risen and all the adults who worked for a living were already gone. She rose from the cot she had been loaned by Simone, one of the younger women of the commune. Talking with Simone the previous night, she had learned that apparently another woman had lived in this cottage with her, but something had happened and that woman left the commune to join another group of werewolves. It left her with extra space and a spare bed, which Hazel appreciated.

Stretching for several seconds, she blinked blearily before her plans for today pushed their way into the front of her brain and a wide smile broke out on her face. That was right, they were going to teach her how to make magic potions! She jumped out of bed and hastily pulled some of her new clothes out of her satchel and changed. Waves of blue magic cleaned the shirt and soft cotton pajama pants she had worn to sleep in, then they were stuffed into the bag. Pulling the curtain over the doorway aside, she stepped outside and breathed in the cool air of the morning.

Few werewolves in the commune ate breakfast, and after the big dinner she had partaken in the night before, she could understand why. She therefore made her way out of the cottage and around one of the dead and cold fire pits, nearly skipping as she did, on her way to a ring of tables and fires and big copper pots off to one side of the clearing. This, she had been told, was where the three younger werewolves had their classes, and today she was going to join them. Not all lessons were like the one today; some were instead about reading and maths, and those lessons she planned on skipping. But lessons about magic she was definitely going to be present for.

She waved to the other people who were already gathered there. Of the now-four kids here, she was actually not the youngest. The oldest was a fifteen-year-old boy with dark hair and eyes and deeply tanned skin named Claude. Next came twelve-year-old Chantal, all blonde and pale skin to set herself apart from Claude. Serge was the last of the three and younger even than her at seven. Standing next to the ring of tables and impromptu cauldrons were two women, one who looked middle-aged with prematurely greying hair and the other younger with a bright smile. Elise and Amorette, or at least she thought that was the younger woman's name.

"Good morning, 'Azel!" Amorette said.

Unlike Jean Luc or Grégorie, Hazel had noticed that most of the werewolves here had trouble with the first part of her name. It was something about how French worked that Jean Luc had tried to explain but just made her more confused. She had instead decided just to accept that they were going to call her 'Azel' for the entirety of her time here and roll with it. She pulled out two notebooks, the first with lines on the pages meant for actually taking notes and the other without lines which she used for communication. Writing on the latter for a minute with a few checks of her dictionary, she finally held it up for the adults to see. _'Good morning. When do we start?'_

"Eager, are you?" asked Elise. Hazel gave her a nod, to which the woman laughed. "Good. _I am glad __**one**__ of the young ones is interested_. Amorette will work with you and Serge today. Chantal, I'll be teaching you myself _and keeping you from staring at Claude the whole time. How he has not noticed your crush, I will never understand_. Claude…" She sighed and shook her head. "I honestly do not know why you keep turning the tanning solution to sludge, but work on it again_, and please get it right this time. We still have some left, but it will only last another month or two_."

Hazel had to work to keep her scowl to herself. The first day she was here, when she had gone walking and talking with Grégorie, they found two dead deer and brought them back to butcher. That part had been gross enough, but it paled in comparison to the smell that came out of a jar of nasty yellow-brown paste he had pulled off a shelf. Even after he had finished coating the hides in and they walked away from his tannery shack, the smell still lingered in her nose for hours.

She could understand how useful it was to have a potion that turned animal skins into leather, but did it have to be so foul?!

"Okay, you two," Amorette said as she motioned for Hazel and Serge to sit at one of the tables. "Both of you are young still, _too young to be brewing on your own_, so we are going to work together to make a simple potion to get rid of sunburns and blisters and things, okay?"

"Don't wanna," Serge said with a pout, his arms crossed over his chest. "_You are not my mommy. I do not have to do anything you tell me to do_."

Amorette's smile turned stiff. Jean Luc had tried to tell Hazel only part of Serge's story the night before, but his thoughts revealed far more. Serge was new to being a werewolf, having been bitten just a few months ago. His parents immediately took him to Paris, not for help but in essence to dump him into the government's arms and run off. The government in turn brought him here to the commune so Jean Luc could take care of him. Serge had not accepted that and made it clear in both thought and spoken word that he firmly believed his parents would come back for him, despite everybody in the commune trying to explain to him that this was his home now.

Before Amorette could say anything, Hazel was writing. _'I want to learn.'_

"_At least somebody is adjusting_. Okay, 'Azel. Serge, you can watch and join in when you feel ready, alright? _Not like most seven-year-olds are learning to make potions anyway_. First, let us talk about the ingredients we have. Burn Balm does not have any animal parts in it, just plants, and the first one…"

Amorette spent several minutes talking about all the herbs and plants on the table between them, then she showed Hazel how to carefully cut the leaves and stems and roots and explained what she meant when she said one had to be diced and another minced. It did not take long before almost the entirety of one lined page was covered in notes, and then it was time to start the real brewing process.

"Azel, I want you to start stirring the pot, and then I will add the ingredients in the order we talked about. Some potions need to be stirred in one direction or another, but for this one it does not matter."

Hearing that, she could not help but frown. Sure, she got to chop the ingredients up, and stirring was important, but there had to be more she could do than just stir. She could stir with just one hand, right? That would let her use her other hand to scoop up the stuff that was within arm's reach.

Or…

She looked down at her left hand and curled her fingers into a fist one by one, starting with her pinky and ending with her thumb. When she opened all her fingers together, a transparent copy of her hand formed in the air in front of her. A sweeping gesture, and her ghost hand wrapped around the long-handled spoon in the cauldron. She moved her real hand in a circle in front of her, and the spoon started turning in a nice wide circle to match. There! Now she could leave the cauldron, though she would still only have her right hand to work with. Her left would have to keep moving if she wanted the spoon to stir.

"I thought I asked you… to… _How are you doing that_?"

Tilting her head, she looked back and forth at her fleshy hand and her ghost hand. She had always used one of her hands to guide her magic, but as she kept moving her hand around and around and around in the same circle, she had to wonder. Could she maybe keep the ghost hand moving without her real hand doing anything? Especially something this simple and repetitive. It was just a circle.

Her eyes fluttered closed as she focused all her attention on how the motions of her hand felt. How the skin slid back and forth. How the bones in her wrist shifted against one another. How the muscles of her forearm pulled tight and relaxed. All the sensations repeated themselves again and again. She kept those feelings at the front of her mind and brought her hand to a stop.

When she opened her eyes, her ghost hand and the spoon were still moving.

A wide smile broke out, and she turned to Amorette and stuck both her thumbs up. Her excitement and enthusiasm faded when she saw the woman staring at her in shock. As was Elise. As were Chantal and Claude. She looked to the side to see that Serge was not, but that might have had more to do with the fact that he had turned around to sit with his back to the rest of them.

'_What?'_, she wrote.

"Where… Who taught you how to do that?" Elise finally asked in a shaky voice. "That… _should be impossible_."

'_Nobody. I teach myself.'_ They kept staring at her, so she continued, _'I teach myself all my magic. Not hard.'_

"You taught yourself? You are eight years old. How could you have taught yourself any of this?!"

'_Not 8. Almost 10.'_

Amorette perked up when she read Hazel's response. "_Almost ten? I wonder when her birthday is._"

"Not that point!" Elise brought her hands up to her face and shook her head. "_What am I supposed to do about this?_ Just keep working on your potion with Amorette _because that is something makes sense. That is normal. Nine-year-old girls who can cast spells effortlessly without a wand are not._

"_I need to ask Jean Luc about this. Maybe he had read something that will explain something about how this is happening._"

* * *

The ground beneath Hazel swept past with frightening speed as the train chugged its way west. Unlike her last train ride, she was not riding on the tongue between two cars. Instead she sat on top of the last car with her eyes closed, just enjoying the wind rushing past her. Navigating the train station in Paris had been an exercise in frustration, but catching a train for a couple of hours sure beat walking for a week and a half.

After spending time in the commune, she had returned to Bristol for a couple of days to do some research. Part of that was looking for a textbook on French, from which she discovered that she was in fact doing French verbs all wrong. Why they needed to make their language so complicated she did not understand, but that sadly was just the way it was. Now she had to memorize tables of endings to tack onto the words.

…Surely it would not be _too_ confusing for her to keep using the base form and let other people figure out what she was trying to say. Right?

The other topic she wanted to do research on was more in the vein of history. Perhaps it was because she was looking in a British library, but she had much more trouble finding any mention of locations in France that held the kind of folklore significance or magical history that she had found so readily for the isles of her birth. With that search at a dead end, she instead started looking into what few figures from French history she knew about.

When she asked Jean Luc, he could not tell her much about Joan of Arc other than that he did not believe she was a witch, and the books she read agreed with that. One of her compatriots, however, was a very different story. Gilles de Rais was an officer in the French army, and after France was liberated from the English he retired to his estate to experiment with diabolism, trying to summon literal _demons_ for reasons that even after a lot of reading she could not figure out. He was eventually arrested for murdering more than a hundred kids to serve as the sacrifices in his rituals, and after his trial he was put to death.

She did not care so much about his execution, but his experiments opened up all sorts of questions. Where was he trying to summon things _from_, for instance. Was there really a place called Hell with demons and dead people, or was he trying to create a portal to an Otherworld like the one she saw at Elva Hill? Did making such a tear really require death and sacrifices? Her research on druids a few months back had mentioned that they might have practiced human sacrifices, and the sealed gate to the Greenwild beneath Glastonbury Tor talked about closing it with 'salt and blood and iron'. Maybe that had been a fancy way of saying the person who did that _did_ sacrifice somebody?

She did not know, but she could not help wanting to find out. Further digging revealed that de Rais's castle was located in a small town named Machecoul. That coincidentally was also where this train was headed.

The train started to slow as it turned a corner, and with a small jump Hazel and Morgan were off the car and standing in grass several dozen yards from the train tracks. Her plan was simple. From what she read, de Rais had never succeeded in his summonings, or at least never _felt_ like he had succeeded, so the chances of running into a monster should be low. She was not going to take any chances though. If she so much as saw something scary, she was getting out of there right quick.

Buildings were visible in the near distance, and she started walking that direction. As she did, another thought niggled at her, one she had done her best to ignore. She had not necessarily told anyone in the commune that she was planning on leaving or when she would come back. She told herself it was because she did not need to. Like she had told Jean Luc when she first met him, she was a wanderer. She had places to explore.

But part of her could not forget the shock Elise and Amorette looked at her with. It was not hate, not the way Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia routinely looked at her, but there was still an element of fear. She just did not know why! Yes, she understood that wizards needed wands to do magic – although the werewolves seemed to do just fine with potions, so she did not understand why that was an exception – but all she was doing was moving something. It was literally the third magic spell she had taught herself to do.

That should not be a reason for them to be afraid. She had not done anything scary or special.

Hazel sniffed and rubbed her nose, doing her best not to think about what that meant for the future. Was this fear something she would have to deal with forever? Unless she found other druids, if she only ever dealt with wizards, would they always look at her as if her kind of magic was unnatural? She had set out from Privet Drive to learn about magic and find more people like her, but despite finding an entire society of magic-users it almost felt like she was more alone now than ever.

Machecoul was a small town, more a village than anything else, and it did not take long for her feet to carry her to a set of towers standing above a pile of crumbling ruins and brickwork. A few other people were wandering around them as well, taking photographs and being tourists just like she was. The more she watched, though, the more something very odd stood out. People were taking pictures of one of the towers and the surrounding walls, but everybody was ignoring the other tower. Not a single person even looked at it.

The other tower which had multiple chains wrapped around it.

She stepped into the ruins proper and walked over to the ignored tower. From the corner of her eye she could see a few people look at her, but as soon as she crossed some invisible threshold they immediately looked away.

_They aren't ignoring me or it_, she realized. _They legitimately can't see us_.

Now that she was closer, she could get a better look at the chains. That took away any possibility that this was not magical. The chains were made from a dark metal with veins of gold running through each link. Nails, thick as one of her fingers but rusted, were punched through the stone walls at regular intervals to hold the chains to the tower. Hanging from the links set between the nails were small golden rectangles, and when she crouched down to examine one she could see that strange shapes and symbols had been carved into the plate all the way through to the other side.

_Well, well, well. de Rais must have succeeded at __**something**__, or there would be no reason for the wizards to hide it like this_. She stood up straight. _The only question is what_.

She reached up to touch the stone walls only for Morgan to squawk and take off from her shoulder. He flew away from the tower and landed on the lip of a window set into the chunk of wall perhaps thirty feet away from her. _What has gotten into you_, she demanded with one hand propped on her hip. _It's just a building. You've been in plenty of them before_.

Morgan sang to her, his song full of terror, and she sighed. _Fine. Stay out here. Don't run off. I'll be back in a couple of minutes_.

There was only door in or out of the tower, and Hazel squeezed herself through the lengths of chain that crossed the entrance way. To her left, a set of stairs curled upwards to the second story she had been able to see from the outside, but while the castle had once been taller that was as high as it went now. To her right, more stairs but going downwards into the earth.

There was only one real option. To the right she turned, following the stairs as they descended into a basement. Reaching into her satchel, she pulled out her torch and clicked it on before her steps resumed. The room she stood in now was tall – or deep, rather – with sconces on the walls for torches or candles to be fitted into. A desk stood on the floor pushed up against the wall, old wax frozen forever as it dripped off the edges. From higher up on the stairs she had been able to see smudges on the floor, but once she reached the landing they were harder to make out from the dark stone. This was not even the lowest level, for a few feet away the stairs began again and descended ever farther.

She stepped lightly as she crossed the floor, staying well away rom the places where she remembered seeing the smudged stains. She did not see any evidence of a demon or a monster lurking around, and stepping on the smudges probably would not draw one out. Still better safe than sorry.

The desk, now that she was next to it, looked in far worse shape than it had when she stood on the stairs. It also was less a desk and more just a table with a thick top. There were no drawers or anything to store pens or ink or books, and she could only assume de Rais and his assistants had brought books and things down to the basement and took them back upstairs when they were done. Even down here, however, the desk could not withstand the ravages of centuries. There were several places that the wood had started to rot, and as her light played over the front she could see how what was not rotting had nonetheless twisted and warped. She was scared to touch it or even to breathe too hard on it. It looked like it could fall apart at any moment.

Retracing her steps, she made her way back to the stairs and peered down. So far she had found nothing of note, certainly nothing worth chaining the building itself up. There had to be some reason for it, though, and it was nothing up here.

The stones of the stairs leading to the second basement felt less even than those above, as if the pressure of the dirt pushing against the walls was making the steps buckle. The deeper she went, the more obvious it became until the last few steps leading to the lowest floor had a difference of easily half an inch or more. The floor itself was hard beneath her feet, but the stone that made it up was buried under a thick layer of dirt and grime. The light of her torch swept across the room and froze in place when it landed on two boys standing in the middle of the room.

They were relatively short, only half a head taller than her if she had to guess, and both wore brightly colored trousers – one blue, one yellow – beneath white long-sleeved shirts that reached halfway to their knees. One was blond, the other brunette, both were barefoot, and they were facing away from her staring at the opposite wall. Even with the light at their backs and clearly shining past them, they did not turn to face her.

Swallowing thickly, Hazel was not sure whether to thank or curse her inability to speak. They were not reacting to the light, but would they react to spoken words? Most likely. Almost certainly. Whether that would be for good or ill, though, that was the question.

She took a small step forwards. Then another. And a third. Despite her approach, the two boys still did not move.

Something crunched beneath her shoes, and she aimed the light down to see what it was. Her eyes landed on bones, lots and lots of tiny bones that looked like they must have come from mice or some other critter of similar size. Her heart started beating faster as she realized where she was _not_ shining the light, and her torch darted back up.

The boys were still, and she let out a quiet sigh only for them to choose that moment to start turning around. Their movements were an eerie synchrony, spinning at the same speed but in opposite directions so their backs were to each other before they faced her fully. The strange shirts they wore were covered with reddish brown stains, long-dried blood that had poured out of numerous holes stabbed into their chests. One, now that she was seeing them fully, was even missing a hand, the stump of his arm roughly hacked away with shards of bone and strings of muscle dangling from the torn flesh.

They cocked their heads in unison, their blank doll's eyes staring at her. "Warm?" they asked in lilting voices.

That question sent a bolt of fear shivering down her spine. She waved the hand not holding the torch in a warding gesture. _Nope. Not warm. Not warm at all. Cold as ice, I am_.

Twin grins appeared on their faces. Not happy grins, nor sad ones. Grins that made her just that much more frightened. "Warm," they repeated. Their hands rose, fingers curling and uncurling as though they were trying to grab something just in front of them, and they started walking towards her.

_Oh no. That isn't happening_. Picturing the outside of the tower, Hazel jumped—

—and her feet landed right back on the grimy floor in the tower. The hand holding the torch started trembling, but she took a quick breath and steeled her will. This was going to work. It had to! She jumped again, but once again she did not go anywhere.

"Warm," the boys said. Behind them, to the sides, even from below, bodies slipped through the walls as if solid stone was nothing but mist and shadow to them. Where once there were just two, now there were two dozen or more, all of them with hands outstretched and eyes locked on her. A few were girls, scattered here and there, but the vast majority of them were boys.

"Warm," the new figures said.

Hazel stumbled backwards, her feet crunching more bones beneath her weight. If she could not teleport away, that only left one other option.

As if sensing her intentions, the grins on the dead children turned into scowls. "Warm. Warm. _Warm_." Their eyes sank into their heads, leaving empty sockets behind, and their bottom jaws dropped to midway down their chests to display mouths full of half-foot-long needle-like teeth. The wailing scream that came from them turned her blood to ice. "_WaaAaRRrMm_!"

She turned tail and ran.

Up ten stairs she fled before she stumbled to a stop. Ahead of her, more of these horrific ghosts slid out of the walls and climbed out from beneath the stairs, their mouths already distorted and their missing eyes nonetheless locked on her. Looking behind, the rest of the ghosts were pushing their way up the staircase. She pressed her back to the wall as they continued their pursuit, left with nowhere else to go.

"_WaRm. WarM. WARM_."

Hands grabbed her wrists and her arms and her shoulders and her legs and her ankles and around her neck. She opened her mouth in a silent scream. This was not right! _No! I don't want to die here! Leave me alone! __**Go away**__!_

The dozen hands holding her suddenly let her free, and her eyes shot open even though she could not remember squeezing them shut. Her head whipped back and forth. All around her, the walking dead had turned around and were descending the stairs or slipping back into the walls. They were _leaving_.

Why?

_Stupid question, Hazel_, she all but yelled at herself. She did not have time to ask why they had changed their minds about eating her. All she had time for was to get out of this place. As soon as the stairs above her were clear, she started running towards the sanctuary offered at the top of the staircase.

The sound of her footsteps was enough to break whatever spell she had somehow laid over the ghosts, and behind and below her the wailing resumed.

Something caught her left foot, and she fell forwards and landed heavily on the hard stone steps. The impact knocked the breath out of her. Gasping, she looked with fearful eyes at her foot and the hand and head that had slipped out of the wall to grab it. The ghost opened its mouth wider than before, a lightless void all she could see deep within its throat. Her other foot kicked out and hit it in the nose, and it shrieked more in shock than in pain. It was still enough for it to let go of her, and this time she did not waste time wondering. She scrambled up the remaining stairs on all fours like an animal until she reached the landing to the first basement. Despite the temptation to look behind to see if they were still following her, she kept her eyes forward and her feet pounding the stone as she kept running up and up and up.

The daylight streaming in through the open doorway was the most beautiful thing Hazel had ever seen, and she dived onto the stone floor and rolled underneath the lowest chain until she lay fully on the grass and dirt outside. From her position on her back, she could turn her head and peer back into the tower. Four twisted human heads were raised above the surface of the floor, and they stared at her in rage and hate and _hunger_ before sinking back down out of sight.

Her head fell fully onto the ground, her breath the quick panting of relief. Fluttering wings next to her caught her attention. Her hand reached up to stroke Morgan's breast feathers. _Clearly you're the brains of this operation. I should __**not**__ have gone down there_.

Morgan shot her a glare and pecked her finger harder than he normally did.

_Yes, yes, I learned my lesson. Stay away from places associated with human sacrifice and demon summoning_. She pushed herself to her feet and looked around. _What I'm more worried about right now is that something's wrong with my jumping and I don't know what. I couldn't get out of there_. Morgan cocked his head at her, and she pointedly looked at the grass five feet away from her. A jump upwards to give him a demonstration—

—and she landed on the other side of the doorway, exactly where she had been looking.

…_Huh_.

She looked down at her feet, lifting her shoes to check the bottoms of them. Had she just been stuck in the ground at the lowest basement? That did not make any sense. She had jumped into and out of soft ground multiple times before now. Two more jumps, both short distances before returning to where she first stood, confirmed that her teleportation was intact again.

Her eyes fell upon the chains and the metal plates hanging from them, and she frowned. Maybe it was not a problem with her jumping. Maybe the problem had nothing to do with her in the first place. Maybe it had everything to do with whatever spells were worked into the bindings.

_Those chains aren't just to keep normal people from noticing the tower_, she told Morgan. _They look like they also keep those ghosts inside. It isn't impossible that they intentionally wanted to keep anyone – or any__**thing**__ – from teleporting out, especially if they were worried the spirits might be able to do just that. Whatever they meant to do, it seems to be working just fine_.

She scooped her friend up and put him back on her shoulder. _Do you think there are other places like this in the world?_

He twittered at her, and she nodded. He had a point. Even if there were, after this? She really should not go looking for them.

* * *

**Happy Halloween, everybody. ;-)**

**Silently Watches out.**


	15. Lessons

**Mystery Melmoth:** Keep in mind that Hazel went into a creepy tower with the idea that if she ran into anything dangerous, she was going to teleport out of the danger zone. That worked for the red cap AND when she first met the werewolves under the full moon. This is the first time anything (ANYTHING!) has interfered with her teleportation. She didn't know that was possible, so of course she couldn't take it into account. Going into a dangerous place with a concrete escape plan that has yet to fail her is far less "borderline retarded" than you make it out to be.

**Mr. Heller:** Wandless magic isn't common; in fact I would say it is outright rare. It is only mentioned a few times in canon, and while per Pottermore (which I do not consider canon, though I will lift stuff from it here and there when I want just like I will from fanon) goes into the slightest bit more detail, that site says that only Ilvermorny in the US and the African magical school teach wandless magic. Wizards in Europe, Asia, Australia, and apparently even South America all use wands. The average wizard in Europe therefore would not know much detail about these other places, and those are the wizards who have actually gone to school. The werewolves have not, hence their reaction to finding a girl who does things that are according to common knowledge "impossible".

**SentinalSlice:** Hazel thinks magic is genetic because she knows she and her mother could both do it, plus what the werewolves told her about Muggleborns. She doesn't know enough about magical traditions to know if wizardry and druidism are just different applications of magic and spellcasting or separate things in truth. Strictly speaking, neither do YOU. :D

**"Exactly what were those ghosts?!":** The spirits (technically a singular chthonic spirit) weren't anything in canon. The kinds of spirits attracted to/created by the ritualist murder of over a hundred children don't tend to be FRIENDLY ones. I wouldn't say that it is evil, per se, but only in the sense that a spider hunting insects isn't evil.

It's also worth noting that canon never exactly dealt a whole lot with spirits in the first place. When my muse decided to throw those into the mix, I knew I was going to be creating a lot of new things with little guidance but folklore, so be prepared for that.

**I'm going to experiment a bit with the formatting since I currently use italics for EVERYTHING. We'll see how it goes.**

* * *

**Chapter 15**  
**Lessons**

The sun had set and stars had taken its place hours ago, but still Hazel sat on the roof of Simone's cottage and looked up to the sky as though it might hold answers for her. As the initial terror of her encounter that afternoon with a bunch of hungry ghosts slowed to a simmer, other concerns had raised their heads. This was the first time she had been trapped in a dangerous situation since she escaped Privet Drive, but it was not the first dangerous situation she had ever been in.

The red cap. Running into transformed werewolves. The magical police back at the library in Greater Whinging, in a manner of speaking. Even the very existence of open doorways to Otherworlds. Magic made scary things real. If she was really going to spend her time around folklore come to life, she needed to be able to do more than run away.

She needed to be able to defend herself.

The idea itself was just one of the problems facing her. Back when she had to go to school, Dudley and his cronies had always been the aggressors. They always got away with it, and she had only made the mistake of lashing back one single time. The punishment she received when she returned to her aunt and uncle had been enough to teach her that fighting back was never the way to go. She was much better served by running away and hiding. It was why she had fallen back on her jumping as her first means of dealing with danger, she realized now, and why the idea of using magic to hit back had never crossed her mind until jumping just was not an option. Overcoming that mindset would be a challenge all its own.

She lifted her hand and turned it over, holding the empty air as though she would a cup. How was she supposed to do that, even? She had tried to start fire to keep herself warm the night she left Greater Whinging, technically the very start of her grand journey. Tried and failed. Somehow, she doubted conjuring a fireball would be any easier. What other ways did she have to fight off something intent on attacking her? Her mind spun fanciful ideas one after another, ranging from streams of fire and ice to beams of bright green light to snapping her fingers and blowing up whatever would hunt her. The longer she thought, the more impossible dreams came to her, but eventually she breathed out and let her hand drop.

Some of her ideas would be great... if they were possible. They just weren't. On a lark, she decided she might as well try out something basic. Closing her eyes, she shoved her worries away to the back of her mind where they could bother her later and focused on the memory of heat in her hand from holding the head of her torch or stretching her hand out towards a fire. Of how the heat reaching into her palm danced on the edges but never overtook the cold of the back of that hand. The smell of wood smoke, the crackling of the flames.

She imagined how it would look, a thin layer of fire licking upwards from her cupped palm, and Hazel breathed out low and long before opening her eyes.

Her hand was still empty.

With a snort she let her arm fall back to the thatched roof. So much for that idea. There had to be **something** she could do. For a long minute she considered the pros and cons of returning to the shopping center in Paris and stealing some books from the bookstore. Surely wizards had to have some way to defend themselves! It would take her hours and hours to translate all the titles of the books to find the few she needed, and longer still to read the book itself, but would it take her less time to figure out how to do this on her own?

Oh, wait. Yes it would, because she had no wand to cast their spells. At most she would have more ideas to use, except she already had plenty of ideas all on her own. She let out a softly growling sigh and covered her eyes with one arm. So much for that plan.

Rather than jumping down and returning to her cot, she stayed where she was. Her sleep was, unsurprisingly, fitful and restless. The rising of the rest of the commune woke her, and she gave them tired waves as they made her way to their various jobs. It would be a couple of hours probably until Elise and the other would start the lessons, and there was no guarantee that it would be potions again today. If it were not, if it were grammar or maths or something, she had even more of the day with which to do she knew not what. _More time to not figure this out_, she thought with a small scowl.

Another rustle and this time it was Jean Luc who came out. His presence inside the camp was normal; the slim stick in his hand, however, was decidedly not. She tilted her head and watched him for a moment, then she rolled over—

—and stood up from the ground. Morgan squawked faintly and took off from the top of the cottage where he slept while she was busy thinking, but she was already walking over closer to Jean Luc and pulling out her unlined notebook. _'What you do?'_ she wrote.

"Laundry day," he replied, jabbing his wand towards the baskets of dirty clothes that she had vaguely noticed a few people bringing out of their respective cottages before leaving the compound. "Years ago we realized it is easier for those of us with wands, _all two of us_, to wash all the clothes with magic than for everyone to wash their own. Magic does make mundane tasks like this much easier." Waving his wand in a complicated swirl at one of the baskets, he said in a deeper and slower voice than he normally used, "**_Locularici_**."

One of the shirts lifted out of the basket and deposited itself on the line stretched between two trees. He moved his wand in a totally different pattern and this time said, "**_Mudafini_**," and this time the colors of the shirt brightened and the dirt ground into the elbows vanished. Repeating the first spell's incantation, he moved the shirt into a wooden chest behind him.

Spreading his arms, he shrugged. "And it's that simple. Marcel and I try to clean an entire basket of clothes at the same time, then we clean out the basket itself and put the clothes back in it. Move on to the next, and that will be the morning gone."

_'Can I help?'_ she wrote. This looked near identical to what she had been doing to her own clothes for the last several months.

"I don't know if _you would be able to..._ _Oh. Right_." He rubbed his chin. "_This is the same girl who can teleport years before she should_. You can give it a try if you wish. Do you need anything... special to learn how to do it?" he asked with a frown.

Hazel shook her head. This? This would be easy. Clenching her fingers one at a time and relaxing them all, she reached out with her ghost hand and pulled out a pair of trousers. Rather than bother with hanging them, she just floated them over to herself and grabbed part of the fabric. With but a thought waves of a blue glow spread over the trousers like ripples over still water. Dirt and grime fell away, and in no more time than Jean Luc's own spell, they were as clean as they had been before being worn. A whirl over her head tossed them into the same chest, and she looked over her shoulder to give him a knowing expression.

"Yes, that will do," he said after a moment. "_If nothing else, it should make the job faster with three of us splitting the work instead of two_. There's another box behind my cabin that Marcel normally uses. Feel free to use that until he _finally wakes up_ and joins us."

A few minutes later, Marcel did exactly that and stared in disbelief at seeing her float the clothes over to her and then into the box once cleaned. It was not a competition, she knew, but she still noticed and took a little pride in the fact that she was moving faster through her clothes than Jean Luc was. Most of that was because whereas she could keep the clothes floating in front of her to clean them, he had to hang them up on the line. Before Marcel could walk away, she pulled out her notebook where she had written a question for him. _'Can wizards only cast one spell at a time?'_

"Uh..." He blinked and shook his head. "_Why would she even ask that?_ Yes? I think some people – _a very very small number_ – when they get really good at a couple of spells, can cast them and hold them while casting another spell. They're in the minority, though, _and Madam Croyanz said that was a sign of an incredibly strong wizard_." His eyes strayed to the chest of clothes behind her. "_Which... Huh_."

With only two boxes between the three of them, Marcel joined her and started working on the same basket of clothes. They worked in silence for several minutes before a question crossed Hazel's mind. Hadn't Grégoire said that Marcel went to the French magic school for a while? Scribbling her question down quickly, she clapped twice and held up the notebook when Marcel looked her way. _'What spells do wizards use to protect themselves?'_

"Protect themselves?" he asked with eyes full of rising fear. "...From what? _Is she talking about us? Does she think she's in danger here?_"

Her own gaze was long and sad. Jean Luc, Grégoire, Marcel. All of them were afraid that she was afraid. Was the fear of werewolves really that widespread that they always worried her own distrust was buried just beneath the surface?

In truth, the world would be better if everyone could hear thoughts just as she could. At least then it would get rid of misconceptions.

Still, she shook her head. _'Dangerous spirits and fairies. Like red caps and trolls and things. Or,'_ she added after some further thought, _'from other wizards.'_

Marcel blew out a small sigh of relief. "_She isn't talking about us. Thank goodness_. Beauxbatons had a dueling class, but it was restricted to students fifteen years old or older. I wasn't old enough to join when I _was expelled_... when I left." He cleared his throat. "We started learning how to defend ourselves from dark creatures in our second year, and before that a lot of us learned spells from the older students that we could use to play pranks on each other. Silly little stuff like turning people's hair odd colors or putting them into dresses. I think some of the older years liked turning people's ears in cacti or giving their enemies duck bills, but that wasn't something I ever learned how to do."

She wrinkled her nose at that comment. Pranks had never been her thing at school; in her experience, 'prank' was an excuse for Dudley to ruin her day. Maybe it would be better if it were something easily fixed with magic, or if it was from somebody she liked? She did not know, nor did she think turning the ghosts' ears into cacti would keep them from trying to eat her. _'How much real fight magic you know?'_

He coughed. "Not much. We didn't have a very good teacher for our Defensive Magic class. There might have been more in our third year, _but I didn't exactly get to see for myself_... Anyway."

She nodded and directed her attention back to the clothes for a brief moment before yet another question hit her fingers. It was not as if she was having any great success with her own efforts to create a fighting spell, so maybe she should not dismiss their advice too quickly. _'What books you use?'_

"_How should I know; that was years ago!_ I don't remember," he told her in a tight voice. "I'd have to look at my old school things, _and I really don't want to do that right now_. I have a question for you, though." She gave him a slow nod, and he continued, "Do you have a way to talk faster than writing them down on a piece of paper?"

This time her response was a sad shake of her head. It was not as if she did not want to talk! This was just as fast as she could go. No one had ever criticized it for being too slow before, but she supposed this was also the first time she had so many people who were willing to listen to what she had to say.

"Would you like to learn one?"

Hazel had not noticed her head drooping, but she certainly felt it pop back up to stare at him. He had a faster way of communicating?!

Marcel pulled out his wand with a flourish. "_Let's see if she can figure this out. Sure, she can move and clean things, but that could all be done with accidental magic. Maybe that's all this is, half-accidental. I doubt she can actually __**learn**__ to do something new. If nothing else, it should keep her too busy to ask a million questions for a couple of days or however long it takes her to get tired of trying_. The incantation is **_Feucriptur_**, without a wand motion. And the way you use it is..." He made a loop-de-loop in the air, and a stream of reddish fire followed the tip of the wand. The wand lowered, but the fire stayed in place for a few seconds before fading away. "You still have to write, _maybe should have made that clearer_, but you won't need to keep track of a pad or a pen. Should save you some time, no?"

Bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, Hazel gave him a wide smile and a clap of her hands. Sure, he did not think she could do this, and maybe not without reason. She had never knowingly turned a wizard spell into a spell that she could do. On the other hand, this would save her some time here and there. Maybe not all that much individually, but considering all her communication had to be done through writing, even a few seconds each time she wanted to talk to somebody would add up over the course of an entire day. Plus, it would be all sorts of wicked to write words in fire in the air.

"That should give you something to do this afternoon," he told her with a smile. "_And hopefully give me some peace. She's the only person who asks me about Beauxbatons, and I'll be happy when I don't have to think about it anymore_."

* * *

The laundry did indeed take the rest of the morning, but by the time they sat down to eat lunch all the compound's clothes were freshly cleaned and returned to their respective cabins. That left Hazel with nothing else she had to do today. She could do whatever she wanted.

It was time to get started on that spell.

She and Morgan made their way away from the compound into the trees of the forest proper. _How are we going to do this_, she asked her truest and featheriest friend. _It seems like all the same problems we had with a fireball, just made even harder_. If she could not form a simple clump of fire in her palm, how was she going to write with it?

Morgan had little to offer, understandable considering he was no more an expert in magic than she was, so she slid down the trunk of one of the trees and leaned her head against the bark. _Should we break it down into steps instead? Maybe we'll find a workaround that way. Step one would be making magic fire. We'll come back to that one. Step two would be directing it to my fingertip or a stick or something, and step three would be writing with it_. Hazel tapped her fingers on one knee in an irregular rhythm, and a thought made its way to the front of her mind. It would be strange, but maybe... _What do you think would happen if I skipped step one and went with just the rest? Do you think I'd make a stream of smoke or something else entirely?_

That was reason enough to give it a try, honestly. She wanted to see what would happen. Concentrating her effort on her finger, she tried to swipe it through the air and make a stream of smoke. Nothing complicated, just a line. She wanted this to work, and she pushed her hope of not being reliant on a notebook into the movement.

Nothing.

Maybe... Maybe she needed to poke a hole in the air? She lifted her hand again to do just that, then she shook her head. What would she even be poking a hole **into**? That sounded like a dead end, and even if it were not it was still a recipe for trouble she did not want.

She shook her head and scattered the possibilities and maybes that wanted to fill her skull. This was not working. Perhaps it was time to go back to the basics. Her successes had all been achieved when she created a mental tool to work with, and just because she was adapting a wizard spell did not mean the same rules would not apply. She had to quit jumping at shadows and think her way through this.

She had a hand to move things. A key to unlock doors. Smoke to hide her. Lightning to fix things. Ripples to clean her clothes. The only thing she did not have a physical tool of some kind for was her jumping, and even that needed her to physically jump. So she needed an appropriate tool for the job. Her issue, then, was that one was not coming to mind.

Her fingers kept on tapping and tapping and tapping, and after several minutes Hazel forced them to stop. Her brain was spinning in circles, going nowhere, and she could feel herself getting more frustrated. She needed to stop, take a break, and let her mind find peace so she could think straight. Closing her eyes, she sat up straight and relaxed her muscles as imaginary roots stretched down deep into the earth. She breathed deep, in and out. This was what meditation was supposed to do, and while she had been using it more to get a handle on her magic, right now it was the primary benefit she was after.

Ideas pinged around and around in her head for a time after she closed her head, but each time one bounced away there were fewer to take its place. One by one they fell away until eventually she was drifting in placid nothingness. Hazel could feel the weight of her own expectations lifting up off of her shoulders, a weight she had not realized she placed there.

Writing with flames? That would be useful and neat, but it should not be an expectation that crushed her. And if she could not do it after all? Translating wizard spells might just not be her skill.

As she let herself drift through a quiet haze, a memory nudged her. Years ago, she could remember standing in the kitchen of Number 4 during Bonfire Night. She had yet to be banished to her cupboard, but only because there were still dishes to clean from dinner and Aunt Petunia had a cold and so did not want to go out into the chilly November air. While she busied herself dunking pots and pans into hot soapy water, she had nonetheless been able to look out the small window above the sink and watch other children her and Dudley's age run around enjoying the fireworks exploding in the sky above. Just one more time they had shoved her nose in the fact that while she might be related to them, they were not really family.

At the time, that was where her attention had been focused, but now that she was free of the Dursleys' grip, she could notice something else. Namely the children. Most of them were too busy watching the display of fire, but she could recall now that some of them were more engaged in their own play. They carried sparklers in their hands, and as they shouted and laughed they waved the sparklers in the air and tried to write their names in smoke and light. None of them were successful, but it had looked like fun nevertheless.

Hazel's eyes opened, her vision taking a moment to adjust to the dimmer light as the sun sank towards the horizon. How long had she been sitting here, she wondered as she stretched her arms and back. The movement woke Morgan, who stretched his neck upwards and twittered to her in confusion.

_I'm okay_, she told him with a soft smile. That seemed enough to placate him for now, so she turned her eyes to her hand. A sparkler, huh? That was a direction she would not have thought of on her own, but the more she considered it the more she liked it as an answer. It felt **right** in a way that lighting the tip of her finger on fire did not.

She had never played with a sparkler before, but she could remember what they looked like when she saw them in the rubbish bin the day after: just thin metal sticks, whatever substance that actually made the sparks already used up. It was easy to image a bit of something being present at the tip, though, and she pictured such a thing sitting in her hand and sticking up straight. Her index finger rested upon it, giving her a better sense of control than she would have with it just poking out of her palm. A hard blink, and the top of the metal stick ignited into phantom sparks.

It looked good so far, but she was well aware that this was only in her mind. It was not proof that it would act anything close to the way she wanted in real life. Deep breaths in and out, and she swished it through the air in deliberate motions. An instant later she shot to her feet, a smile stretched wide over her face and her eyes glued to what she had accomplished.

The word _'Hi'_ made out of flickering, whitish-gold light floating in the air before her.

* * *

**Shorter than I had planned, namely in that there was supposed to be another scene here, but I figured you guys have waited long enough. Feeding you lot FREQUENTLY is more important than feeding you a set AMOUNT. ;-)**

**And if you're wondering, yes, the French do use different incantations than English wizards do. That is an intentional decision, not an author error.**

**Silently Watches out.**


	16. The Cave

**CastleTrime:** New werewolves are generally going to be young rather than old. A large part of that is the simple fact that adult wizards have more ways to drive off or escape a rampaging werewolf, and magical children do not. Muggles almost invariably don't survive the initial attack, so they don't offset that unbalanced proportion. It doesn't help that when an adult wizard IS bitten, they have a better understanding of how their new condition will ruin the life they are used to and therefore tend to… How do I put this delicately? End matters on their own terms.

As for Greyback, my understanding of canon is not so much that he's feared because he targets children but because those he targets nearly always survive. Werewolves in general don't have the control when transformed to hold back. They keep lashing out until the victim dies or they are driven off. Greyback, even under the full moon, acts with intent. He bites and runs, his goal accomplished. It's the difference between being attacked by a rabid animal and being hunted by a man.

**osterreicher97:** French wizards also use a bastardized version of Latin, but they mix Latin words with FRENCH where the Brits mix it with English. That made more sense to me than the idea that wizards everywhere use the same incantations. It isn't like magic began with the Romans, after all.

* * *

**Chapter 16**  
**The Cave**

By the end of the night, Hazel almost regretted figuring out how to write in the air.

Or no, that was not quite right. The writing itself she was very happy with. It was showing her new spell to anyone else she regretted.

Marcel was the first person she went to, both because he set the challenge for her and because she wanted to thank him for showing her that it was possible. Hazel knew that his real reason for suggesting she try to learn this was because he wanted her to go away and not ask him about his time at wizard school, but she thought he would at least be impressed that she had figured out how to do it provided she quit poking at his massive sore spot. He might not have finished his schooling, but he still knew useful stuff, and her success was a testament to that. Instead he had watched her form letters made of glowing white sparks, and his thoughts had passed through disbelief and eventually settled on wariness.

The rest of the commune had either yet to return from work or were waiting to use the shower stalls set up in the back of the compound, so not everyone saw her demonstration. Jean Luc and Elise, however, did. Elise had the same reaction to seeing this as she had when Hazel started stirring the cauldron with her ghost hand: disbelief and confusion, including telling herself several times that what was there in front of her eyes was impossible.

Jean Luc's reaction was the most interesting of the three, though it did not bring her any relief. His thoughts had actually become quieter to her ears, and rather than forming sentences they were broken phrases. Hazel had only experienced something like this once two years ago, when Miss Brandine, the school librarian back in Little Whinging, had found out her husband was divorcing her. She had gotten quieter and paid no attention to anything going on around her, and she wore the same deeply contemplative expression that Jean Luc had.

After demonstrating her new talent to three people and with zero positive responses, she decided quickly that she was not going to show anyone else, or not right now anyway. Not until she could figure out just why she was eliciting such…

Her heart sank as she finally put a name to the emotion the werewolves felt upon seeing her magic. Such **fear**. It was not the same kind of fear the Dursleys had felt, not a fear that turned into anger, but it was present nonetheless. She just could not understand why.

She sat at her own when everyone started eating the roast beef Elise and Amorette had prepared for dinner, her mind half on the conversations going on around her and half on her own task for the evening. When she had started writing her response to Marcel, he had to come to where she was standing in order to read it. She had not thought about that issue, so now she let her fingers drift in the air tracing letters backwards. If she was looking at somebody and writing backwards, they should be able to read it more easily. She was also using her left hand to do this; she was right handed, so if she could write with her left hand and do other things with her right, she would be able to multitask in conversations as well as anybody else could!

Assuming she would ever be able to hold a conversation with anybody without freaking them out, that was.

Movement to the side of the group caught her attention, and she glanced over to find Jean Luc and Marcel walking away towards the cabins. They did not look like they were just headed the same way, either, but instead they were standing close together. _What in the world are they doing_, she wondered to herself. Setting her plate down on the bench in front of Morgan, who started eagerly pecking at the scraps of beef still sitting there, she breathed out a thin cloud of ignore-me smoke around herself and carefully chased after them.

The pair took a wandering course towards the middle of the compound before they stopped and turned to face each other. "What do you want to talk about," asked Jean Luc, "_although I think I know already_."

"Hazel," Marcel replied without a moment's hesitation. "_As if there was going to be any other topic_. Jean Luc, what the **hell** is up with her?! She learned a brand-new spell she had never heard of in a matter of hours. She's casting multiple spells **at the same time** without a wand. That would be astounding if she were ninety and had been learning magic all her life. She's **nine** and a Née-Moldus at that! What she's doing is _horrifying_… creepy."

"I wouldn't say that she is creepy. _Eerie is probably the better term_." Jean Luc sighed. "But I understand your concern. The things she can do are unnerving. Impressive, but unnerving. Especially at her age."

"At any age. I couldn't do any of that before school. I can't hold multiple spells like she can **now**. I've never met anybody who could. _Although from what I heard about him, old man Escrim would have given his left testicle to have her in his dueling class. If she learned to hold a **Clipeo** shield and could still freely curse people?_" Marcel shook his head. "You've read a lot more than me. Have you ever read about anything like this?"

"Not that well-read. It is not like I ever thought knowing about wandless would be a priority of mine," Jean Luc told him with a sigh. "_Now I wish I had_. I want to say I read at one point that the Africans do not use wands, but I don't remember if they actually do wandless magic or use something else. The Gypsies use handmade jewelry to cast spells, I know I read about that years ago, so something like that is a possibility. Even then, they don't cast multiple spells at once like she did this morning. _Nor does she have the same excuse. She doesn't have a wand-analogue like they do. It's just all her._"

"So we still don't know how she does this. About the only thing I do know is that this isn't just accidental magic. She's totally in control of it. She can **learn**. _And if she can do this now, what will she be able to do in the future?_" Marcel wondered to himself. "_Wizards can and have made our lives miserable, and with them we know what their limits are. We don't know what she's capable of, and that? That is terrifying_. Her magic… It isn't natural, Jean Luc. It sounds almost like what my uncles told me about fighting Grindelwald's army during the War. _Dark magic_."

Hazel cocked her head and frowned. Dark magic? What was that?

The bald wizard scoffed. "Please do not tell me you think Hazel is a dark witch, Marcel." The younger man radiated embarrassment while Jean Luc continued, "That is preposterous for any number of reasons. Besides," he said after a moment, "I don't know that her magic is **unnatural**. It might, however, be **inhuman**."

"Inhuman? What do you mean? _What is the difference?_" Marcel asked, voicing the same question Hazel had.

"Exactly that. I've been wondering all night whether Hazel is entirely human, or if there is something… else in her bloodline. Part-humans normally inherit traits from their non-human parent, so if one parent was a Moldu and the other was some other type of being? That would explain how a Née-Moldus could have such phenomenal abilities."

"_I guess that is not the **least** possible explanation_. What kind of being do you think she is then?"

Jean Luc spread his arms wide. "That, I do not know. _None of the combinations I can think of would explain her abilities, but_ there are too many options _to say for sure_."

With a frown, Hazel thought about that. She knew this was not the case for her; thanks to Aunt Petunia's memories, she knew her mother had the same talent with magic that she did. Could her mother have had this strange parentage? After a moment, she shook her head. Never mind, that was foolish. Her aunt was her mother's sister, so she should have the same powers.

Then again… It still did not explain why she and her mother had magic and her aunt and cousin did not. When she first heard about Nés-Moldus, she wondered if her mum was one. Did magic just pop up randomly, totally unrelated to whether other members of the family had it?

She had no way to tell, and really that was not the major problem. What was a concern was the fact that Marcel and Jean Luc were still this worried and scared about it.

As if reading her own mind, Marcel said in a low voice, "What should we tell the others?"

"_Tell the others?_ Why would we tell them anything?"

"What do you mean? Jean Luc, don't you think everyone else needs to know about this?!" he demanded. "This is too big to keep a secret?"

"Is it? Really?" Jean Luc crossed his arms and watched with narrowed eyes before continuing in an almost lecturing tone, "What would you tell them?"

"What we just talked about. What she can do, that she might not be fully human."

"Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And how, **exactly**, would that help the group? What would we do differently as a whole with this knowledge?"

"I… don't know."

Jean Luc nodded. "I don't see that anything would change in a beneficial matter. What I worry about is that they would be just as scared of a lone little girl as you are. Will that do Hazel any good?"

Marcel sighed. "…No."

"So my question remains. If there is no benefit to anybody in announcing our suspicions – and that is all they are – we should not do it in the first place. Should Hazel show more of us what she can do, that is her decision, but we will not make it for her. It is not our place to do so. Do you understand?"

Marcel nodded, and Hazel decided this was the time to back away and go somewhere else. Anywhere else. She skirted the edge of the central cooking and dining area and kept walking until she slipped between the trees again into the darkened forest. Only once the campfires were almost out of sight and the rest of the compound was out of earshot did she stop, lean against a tree, and slide down to the ground.

Fluttering in the shadows reached her ears seconds before Morgan flew to her and landed on her knee. He looked up at her and twittered in confusion and concern.

_I'm sorry for not coming back for you_, she told him as she ran her fingers down his back. _I just needed to get away from there_.

_I'm starting to worry what the future's going to look like_. Morgan blinked, so she explained, _So far I'm nought for I don't know how many times I thought I would be accepted by other people. It's like no matter what I do, I scare them away. The Dursleys were afraid of me. Everyone I ever met in Little Whinging was afraid of me_. She nodded her head in the direction of the compound. _Now they're becoming afraid of me. You and that hellhound in Wistman's Wood are the only living things that aren't_.

Her head fell to her chest, and tears started welling up in her eyes and dripping down her cheeks. _Is it my fault? Is there something wrong with me, and that's why I scare everybody away? How would I change that to make people like me?_

_How do I become something I'm not when I don't even know what I really am?_

* * *

Waves gently sloshed against the shore, wet slaps as water hit rock occasionally reaching Hazel's ears. The last time she had walked the shores of Tintagel, rain had been pounding on top of her, and the sea had been a vicious beast eager to gobble her up. Now, in the early afternoon sun and the warmer air as spring was rapidly giving up ground to summer, it was actually rather pleasant.

She made sure to stay close but not too close to the family in front of her. Her ignore-me smoke was wrapped tightly around her, and as long as she looked like she could possibly be an additional member of the family of five, she was confident that no one would pay her any mind. She assumed so, anyway; no one had made any mention nor had any thoughts yet about her colorful clothing or her strange satchel or the songbird on her shoulder. She was not eager to try testing that conclusion, though, not when that might mean dodging well-meaning strangers who wanted to take her back to her 'family'. She had too many plans still to work on that running away would interfere with.

Plans such as finally – finally! – returning to Merlin's Cave.

Sand slid and crunched beneath her feet, but she continued her walk towards the large entrance of the cave. No light came from the depths, and she tilted her head this way and that while she drank in its appearance. Any sharp edges were long since worn away, but the interior still had large shelves and protrusions of stone. Several people were already there, talking animatedly and taking pictures, but Hazel found herself both confused and disappointed.

According to legend, this was where Merlin himself had lived during the birth and raising of King Arthur. She had expected... she did not truly know, but something grander. Something worthy of the home and workshop of such a marvelous sorcerer. Arthur and Merlin might have lived roughly 1500 years ago as best as she could figure it, but even with the erosions of time she thought there would be some sign that it had been inhabited at one point in time. From what she could see, it did not look very homey.

She left the family she was following and moved deeper into the sea cave. Her feet splashed through puddles of standing water while the light coming from the mouth dimmed as she ducked behind stone slabs. There had to be something, she knew it. Turning her head slowly along the back wall, she stopped and blinked.

Part of the wall was... **undulating**, like it was made of paint that had not quite dried and was trying to drip away.

A glance around to make sure nobody was looking at her, and she stepped towards the strangely distorted wall. The closer she got, the more it rippled and shifted like a living thing trying to squirm away from her. She had seen a strange, ever-changing phenomenon before, and following a hunch she closed her right eye and stared at the wall with only her left. Just as she expected, without the help of her crystal lens the wall looked like just an ordinary stone wall.

Her fingers reached out to touch the wall, and it parted before her like oily smoke. _What do you think?_, she asked Morgan. When he made a small curious chirp, she nodded. _Yeah. Me too_. Taking a deep breath, she gave the rest of the room one quick glance before stepping into the wall.

She opened her eyes to find darkness waiting for her, so she pulled up the flap of her satchel and started reaching around. Clothes, water bottle, notepad, more clothes... _I really need a better way to organize this_, she grumbled as she continued digging. Curling her fingers, she summoned her ghost hand to try holding things out of the way while she kept looking for her **bloody torch**—

A slight coolness washed over the skin of her fingers an instant before a hard metal tube slammed into her palm. Pulling it out, she reached over with her other hand and touched the flared head of her torch. ..._Huh_, she finally thought. _That's convenient_. Her thumb pressed the switch to ignite it, and she swept the beam over the new area that had been revealed.

Her grin rivaled her torch in its brightness. Pieces of rotten wood had been jammed into clefts in the wall above natural stone shelves. Remnants of a low frame to one side must have been a bed, and a still functional-looking table was pushed to the back of the cave. It was in the middle of the room that the greatest prize sat, however: a statue carved from a single flawless piece of crystal. A statue depicting an old man only a little taller than herself, his right hand outstretched with fingers curled and his left hand raised above his head grasping a thin wand.

A statue that could be of only one man.

Hazel moved forwards and looked over the many facets of the massive crystal. It might not be a tomb, but it was a beautiful remembrance nonetheless. Merlin was a well-known and well-loved figure of myth in the modern day, but this was proof that he had been respected by others capable of magic back when he was alive. His abilities were magnificent, and he was widely regarded as the greatest wizard ever to have his story told.

A frown crept onto her face at that thought, and she seated herself on the ground with her eyes still fixed on the sculpture. _You were a legend even in your day_, she told the statue. _Your gift of prophecy was famous. You were a marvelous magician. You stood head and shoulders above anybody and everybody, and for this you were **adored**_.

She sighed. _I can't help but wonder what the difference is between you and me._

_If the legends are right, you were different from the moment of your birth. The son of a mortal woman and a demon. You should have been feared; people should have seen you as a monster. And yet, everyone came to you for answers, for your guidance and wisdom. How?_

_I'm different, but not like that. I have no voice of my own, and I need no wand to use my magic. Why do people fear my abilities but loved you for yours? To be able to see someone's future is no less scary than hearing their thoughts, and that skill I've kept hidden. Nothing I've done should be terrifying. Why, then, am I looked at with fear and mistrust? I don't understand._

The statue, as expected, had no reply to her questions. Instead she let her gaze play over the speckles of light that were scattered by the facets of the crystal. Her mind followed her eyes in their aimless wanderings, and several minutes passed before a thoughtful expression took over.

_Other than your parents, I know nothing about your childhood_, she told the statue. _I've found no books about it. It makes me wonder. Is the difference between us that your legend has already been told? You accomplished so many incredible things, but they all happened when you were an adult. To be that kind of an adult, you must have been gifted just as much when you were a child. What was that like for you?_

_Were you adored and praised as a child just like you were when you were grown? Or was young you more like me? Were you also feared for your powers, and that fear just became replaced by awe as you got older and people stopped worrying about how young you were and instead focused on what you could do?_ She drummed her fingertips on the stone ground. _Does that mean that all I need to do to be accepted is just to keep going? To not let their fear get to me?_

Silence surrounded them for a while longer before she pushed herself to her feet. _I think I understand a little better now_, she told the statue. Laying her hand on the crystal, she gave Merlin a small smile. _Thank you._

_And don't worry. Your secret is safe with me._

* * *

The next several days were... unremarkable, at least on the surface. Hazel attended magic-related classes with the other younger werewolves, whether that be potions or history or some basic magical herb lore. On days they learned about maths or writing, she ducked away to walk the woods with Grégoire and check the snares he had set out, in the process learning how to set said snares or identify animal tracks. Other days she pestered Jean Luc, and once he found that she had already learned long multiplication and division in school, he let her help out working with the heavy ledgers that contained all the information about the commune's finances. When he was working he was focused, but whenever he took a few minutes' break he was happy to answer questions and share some of what she soon realized was a font of information on all sorts of subjects.

And as she continued not doing anything unusual, everyone's tension drained away.

Those were the days, though. Night, on the other hand, was **her** time. Under the cover of darkness with only the trees and the stars to witness her, she stole away from the camp. There was no way she would simply abandon her experiments, but she now recognized that it was in private that she would be allowed to continue pushing her boundaries and learning more about her magic.

Blowing out a frustrated huff, Hazel crossed her arms where she sat on the ground. It would be better if her experiments would actually work. Every night she had tried something different as a means of fighting back if something attacked her, and so far she was not seeing any success. She had tried throwing a fireball. She had tried throwing icicles. She had tried lightning bolts. She had tried blowing out a cloud of poison gas. She had even tried creating a magical shield strictly meant to defend herself.

None of these attempts had shown even a shadow of success.

That did not mean it was a waste of time, not exactly. These failures had taught her a few things about the capabilities, and more importantly the limits, of her particular brand of magic. Her magic could change things, like her healing and her cleaning spells did. She could manipulate both objects and people. What she could **not** do, on the other hand, was create things out of thin air. That was the conclusion she had drawn from her various attempts. It was also understandably frustrating.

If she could not create something with which to hit back, how was she going to defend herself the next time a hungry fairy or ghost came after her?

Scrubbing her face with her hands, she let her mind relax and her vision go a bit blurry. Creating a new construct, a new tool, was not working out this time around. The last time she was stuck like this, she had gone back to the basics and figured something out from there. Did she already have a spell that would let her do what she wanted?

Teleporting and cleaning were of course right out. She did not think she could lock or unlock anything about an angry fae creature. Her ignore-me smoke... She shrugged. If she was at the point where she was fighting something, she did not think her smoke would do much good. Her ghost hand probably was not strong enough to lift anything the size of the red cap off the ground, although that would have been a neat way to keep it away from her. Her healing, maybe? Could she un-heal something? A small shiver worked its way down her spine. Somehow, she could see that ending badly.

Sure enough, nothing she already knew would help her here. Hazel slapped her hand against the ground and glared into the distance. A moment later, she blinked once. Twice. Thrice, and then she slowly pulled her eyes back to her hand and the dirt below it.

_Morgan?_ The little songbird opened one eye at her and chirped sleepily. _I'm an idiot_.

He chirped again and closed his eye.

She ignored his dismissal and glared at her dirty hand. She had a **hand**. If her ghost hand could pick things up and move them around, if it acted just like her normal hand, she could slap with it. She could **punch** with it.

A good-sized rock sat a short distance away from her, and she climbed to her feet to walk towards it. Would this work? She curled her fingers one by one and called forth her ghost hand. It made a fist that matched the fist her real hand was in. With nothing else to try, she swung her arm in a wide arc. The ghost hand followed and hit the rock.

Nothing happened, but with a silent groan she realized that was not a surprise. Did she really think she could punch a hole in a rock? She looked around for another rock to put on top of this one, but nothing was immediately visible. _Fine. Punching the ground it is_. Winding up again, she drove her ghost fist into the dirt and knelt closer to peer at the her impromptu target.

It was hard to make out, but was there a little tiny bit of an indentation where she had punched?

She punched several more times trying to make any evidence of its collision larger, but between the dark and how hard the ground was, she could not really tell. She eyed her flesh fist and her ghost fist again. _I wonder how hard I'm even hitting. Worst case I guess is that it isn't doing anything, but what if the best case is that my ghost hand punches as hard as I can?_ Going back to her knees, she reared back and slugged the ground only to pull back from the pain that was now bouncing around between her hand bones. There were definitely rocks just underneath the dirt!

After a minute of waving her hand around to make the pain stop, she looked down again and sighed. She could not say for sure that even her real fist had done anything. Poking her little twig arms explained why that was the case. _I'm not going to get much more power out of that, I don't think_.

If she could not swing her ghost hand harder, was there anything else she could do to make it just that little bit stronger? Could she change it somehow? She had never tried to do that to any of her spells, but there was no reason she **couldn't**, she supposed.

Maybe she could make it smaller? She could remember getting hit in the face by a dodgeball a few years back during recess, and that had not been nearly as painful as the time when Dudley threw a cricket ball into her ribs. If she made her fist more compact, it might hit with more force.

She stared at the still-closed ghost hand and narrowed her eyes. It took a few moments, but the fist eventually started getting a little smaller. The more she pushed on it with her mind, the smaller it got, and by the time it was no bigger than a large marble it had also lost all definition between the fingers. It was just a single solid sphere. It still moved in time with her real hand, and with a shrug she swung again at the dirt. This time when she leaned in, she could see a definitive dent in the ground.

_Finally!_ She dropped onto her bum and then her back, looking up through the break in the trees' canopy to the stars above. Turning her head to face Morgan, she continued, _It isn't great, and I don't know how much of a punch it will pack, but it's better than what I had before_.

She turned her head back to the stars and sighed. Despite the enthusiasm she wanted to display to her friend, she had her doubts that it would work all that well. Dirt was not very hard, and if all she could do was dent it a little, how much would it really scare anything that wanted to eat her?

Her eyes glanced around the sky. She did not know many of the constellations, almost none of them in fact, and she could find even fewer. The only one she had really been able to pick out reliably over the last few months was Orion, and so it was that figure she sought in the night. Maybe it was because her window was so small, or maybe it was just the wrong time of night, but despite a minute or two searching she was unable to locate the Hunter. She would have to try later on, she decided while closing her eyes. It was unfortunate Orion wasn't a real person. It would have been incredible to learn how to defend herself from a mythical hunter, although for all she knew his advice would just be to shoot a bow at whatever was coming after her—

Pushing herself upright again, she stared at nothing with wide eyes. Would that even work? She could not create fire or ice, so how would she create an arrow? She couldn't.

But... But. She raised her hand and nodded to herself. If she could turn her ghost hand into a ball, could she continue to reshape it? One by one her fingers curled in, and once again her ghost hand appeared. She sighed in relief. She was not sure how she would have reacted had she lost the ability to cast one of her first spells.

It took less effort this time to shrink the fist down to an orb, but that was not the end of it. She **stretched**, for lack of a better description, the orb as if it were a ball of caramel or chewy candy. Two lumps pulled apart, a string of magical whatever-it-was she used to make her constructs strung between them. The far lump became a diamond-shaped head, and the close lump became tilted rectangles that looked mostly like the feathers on an arrow.

The arrow drifted the short distance into her palm, and she rolled it between her fingers. It was... not terrible, she eventually decided, but it did not feel good in her hand. It was just too unbalanced or awkward or something. Maybe if she were older, if her hands were bigger, it might not be as bad, but right now it was not what she needed.

_Still_, she told herself, _I think I'm on the right track. Just not there yet_. Twirling the arrow between her fingers, she wondered just what she could do with this. Stab something, maybe? She certainly could not throw it, not as large as it was. If it were smaller? That would be better.

A thought started making the arrow get shorter, and as it shifted she realized what it was starting to look like. The Christmas before she left the Dursleys, almost a year and a half ago now, Dudley had begged and demanded to get a dart board and darts. He snapped the board in half the very next day when he discovered how bad he was at aiming, and then the darts were lost one by one as he remembered he had them and threw them at Hazel while she worked in Aunt Petunia's rose bushes. She **might** have helped them disappear so they would not get them thrown at her a second time.

Almost as though it knew what she had in mind, the head of the arrow narrowed into a long almost-teardrop shape and fused with the shorter fins. She tossed the dart in her hand a couple of times, then a flick of her wrist flung it into the dirt.

It could have been entirely due to the angle, or possibly this shape truly was stronger, but instead of putting another dent into the ground it threw up a small cloud of dirt.

Hazel stared at the ground where it landed, and a small sharp smile alighted onto her face. As far as driving something off, this had potential. The real question now was whether she had to take the time to reform her ghost hand into the dart every time, or could she go straight to the dart form? Her wrist twitched, and she imagined she could feel the smooth surface of the dart that reappeared in her hand. Again she threw the dart, not with the careful overhand pitching movement Dudley had used but instead by slinging her hand to the side and releasing it from between her index and middle fingers.

This time a trail of glittering sparks, not unlike those formed by her sparkler, followed the dart as it flew true and hit the rock she had aimed at the first time. She shined her torch at the rock, and unless she was very much mistaken, there might actually be a small dent in the stone's surface this time.

Another twitch of her wrist, and Hazel dismissed the dart that appeared yet again. Instead she curled her fingers and watched her ghost hand, completely unharmed by her experiments, take the torch from her fleshy hand and flick off the switch.

She shot her sleeping friend a smile. _Morgan, I do believe we have a winner. We don't need to be afraid of fairies or weird ghosts ever again_.

* * *

**I was doing a little more research on the feeding habits of the blue tit and other titmice, and it turns out that the great tit is well known for scavenging dead animals and even killing small bats when food is scarce. Since they'll both eat suet (a type of animal fat) as well, I expect Morgan would be happy munching on meat put in front of his greedy beak.**

**Magical inheritance (I hesitate to say magical genetics because it doesn't make sense from a genetic standpoint) is just one of the many topics I wish we had better information about. It gets a little frustrating to figure out just what is actually going on.**

**One more note, and I'm done. I swear. I'm well aware that Rowling claims Merlin was sorted into Slytherin. My response is quite simple: bullshit. Considering Arthurian legends depict both Arthur and his father Uther fighting against the Saxons, that would place the time period somewhere in the 5th to 6th century, roughly FIVE HUNDRED years before the building of Hogwarts. Now, would Merlin have fit the characteristics of a Slytherin? Yes. Was he a Slytherin? No.**

**Silently Watches out.**


End file.
